Materials & Supplies for Painting a Living Room

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter. Today I represent expertvillage.com. Now I want to talk a little bit about the materials we're going to need to remodel the living room. First of all we need to do our prep work and the main things we need are caulking, spackling, and of course sand paper. Now first of all you're going to need to get some acrylic latex caulking. This is what painters use and we use the brilliant white. There's a silicon caulk out there for sealing stuff up, don't use that it's unpaintable. This is acrylic latex and it has just a little drop of silicon on it for resisting water. But this is paintable, and use the brilliant white, not the clear, so you know where your lines are. For spackling, you use a lightweight spackling, it dries really really quickly and it sands really easy and you can flatten it out. There's a lot of other stuff out there but if you use the lightweight spackling, it'll always do a great job for you. And for sanding I recommend a 220 grit sandpaper. 320 will work, it'll give you that smooth surface you're looking for but that's going to fill really, really fast. Now if you have a real light touch you can use a 120, and I have done that, but the 120 does mark up the surface a little more than the 220 and it may not do the trick unless you're really good with sandpaper. Now, when you're buying your paints, for the ceilings, they do make a special paint, it's called a ceiling white, and that's what you want to do your ceilings in. Whether it's an acoustic ceiling or a flat ceiling like this one, the ceiling white is going to lift that ceiling and bring it up higher. So use the ceiling white flat and you're going to find that you're going to get a much taller room and a much brighter room as well. Now for the walls, I'm just using latex paint, there are acrylic latex flats you can use too, use a flat paint though, that way it'll absorb the light instead of it bouncing, kind of like it is now, that's what I'm painting over it for. I got a couple of gallons today; I don't know if I'm going to cover in one, and I wanted to be sure I had enough paint. It's always better to buy too much paint, because it is actually cheaper when you buy an extra gallon than if you buy an extra quart. Finally we are going to want some sheen to our trim, our doors, and our baseboards. So whenever you're painting those you want to use an enamel. A lot of people paint these in oil but most of the time today we use just a latex enamel paint. This is the acrylic latex and I'm using the semi gloss. Now I like the semi gloss, some people like a little less sheen with the satin, and some people like a little more with the gloss. I'm kind of a middle of the road guy and if you go with the semi gloss you're going to find that is what most people use. Well these are all the materials that you're going to need to be able to remodel your living room."