Drop Cloth Protection When Painting an Exterior Wall

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Grady Johnson and I am a professional painter and today I am representing expertvillage.com. Okay, we've gone ahead and got our wall all primed out. Everything is nice and dry and really clean and remember when you are doing this priming work, you want to go ahead and let it dry for at least 2 to 3 hours before you come back on it. It's a good idea with caulking too especially when you have deep corners when it has a lot of caulking. Let that dry really really good before you attempt to paint back over it. Before we begin our painting, we are going to have to drop off this area. When we were spot priming and prepping, we just kind of pulled the drop along with this but it is a little bit different when we are doing finished coat painting. Now when you are painting even if it's outside and it's a little old paint on the ground, you want to go ahead and drop off anywhere you think paint might land and you do this just so you don't make it worse if it is already there and of course, if there is no paint there to begin with, you don't want to be the one who marks it up. So the first thing to do is go ahead and lay out your drop cloth. Now you want to use a runner and if you are using a runner, go ahead and fold that in half because you don't want the paint to seep through. As long as you got it doubled up, you should be fine and then throw that on out. Once you have that all laid up, you want to even that up next to your wall. Go ahead and tuck that in with your foot. Just make sure that it is all sealed in. You want to be sure that it overlaps the other drop that was down here. You see how that overlaps a little bit. Now we also got a little wind today so you want to take that into account. Just something heavy on there; a piece of wood or rock to hold down your drop cloth. You want to go ahead and get the rest of it and take it all the way out to the end and drop off the whole area and then is how we drop off the area to prepare ourself for painting the exterior wall. "