Painting an Exterior Wall & Home Improvement

Series Summary

Since the dawn of time, man has sought to his ameliorate his humble dwelling with repairs and improvements, adding a room, painting, installing new light fixtures, and the list goes on. Home improvement projects can be some of the most rewarding—or most frustrating—tasks homeowners can tackle. But home repair and maintenance can be done successfully with the proper tools and the right knowledge. The key to making your home improvement project relatively hassle-free is a tactic that has worked for ages: divide and conquer. With step-by-step instructions and safety procedures in hand, Sunday afternoons walking around the house with a screwdriver and a plan can resume.

In this free DIY project on video, learn how to paint the exterior of your home. Our expert will show you everything you need to know to get the job done. Get tips on preparing the wall with a pressure washer, scraping off old paint, caulking, spackle, priming, and more. Learn the proper paint rolling techniques to get an even, professional result. Watch these videos carefully, and turn a potentially disastrous endeavor, both for you and your home, into a simple painting project. When you’re done, you’ll have a house that looks fresh and new.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Grady Johnson, I'm a professional painter and today I'm representing expertvillage.com. Okay, today we're going to paint an exterior wall and when you're painting an exterior wall there are a few things that you need to do to prepare for it. One of the first things you need to think about is this is physical exercise, you're going to need to stretch out a little bit, prepare yourself before you do this work. It's always good to keep yourself hydrated as well, because if you get overheated, believe me it's not going to make for a fun job and you don't want to leave painting half done or it makes a mess. Now, once you've gotten yourself ready to go, then you're going to need to prepare your area. Now, you can see looking at this wall there's a lot of clutter around here, make sure when you're painting there's nothing underneath your feet, you want it all cleaned up for yourself. We're going to talk a little about the proper tools and what we need to buy to be able to do this job and we're also going to talk a little bit about the preparation. Painting is all about prep, so we'll talk about caulking, spackling, scraping and also spot priming. Remember it's physical work and it's important to keep hydrated. When you're working outside generally you are in the sun, if it's nice weather especially and you're going to want to be sure and keep yourself nice and cool. So wear some protective eye gear to keep the stuff out of your eyes and you want to wear dark glasses to kind of block the sunlight. Most the time you're painting with pastels or light colors, so when that stuff reflects, you want to have something to protect your eyes. You can damage your eyes with too much light and if you get too much light during the day it will ruin your night vision. Also, remember to wear a hat, a hat is a good thing to do, when you have on a hat it protects your head and also keep you from getting burnt up. I'll also talk about actually washing the walls and the eves and also today we're going to discuss a little bit about how to do actual painting. Now a few things that have to be painted here, we're going to paint the eves underneath and on top on the front and we're also going to paint our wall. Now, there are a few techniques that we're going to go over that tell you how to do that, but those are the areas we're going to paint, so we'll talk a little bit about how to cut and how to roll. Okay, that's everything we're going to do here, we're going put together a brand new wall with two coats, we're going to paint the eves and we're going to paint the walls and we'll talk a little bit about how to clean everything up, that's our brushes and our rollers and that's everything you're going to need to know to do an exterior paint job."