Prep Bedroom for Painting Child's Mural

Video Transcript

"For our mural, we're going to be painting this whole wall. Everything on here, this pale color is going to go away entirely. That means that we need to prepare our wall and floor just like we would a normal painting project. Starting off with taping. Get your good blue, electrical, painter's tape, and start ripping off pieces of it. What we're going to be doing here is we're going to be covering up the trim. You can already see I've done an awful lot of this, but we want to make sure there are no gaps and the like. Areas where you could see where like paint could drip over and basically ruin our wood. Now sometimes you may get a little bit of paint on the wood no matter how good your efforts are but painting, putting on the painting tape helps avoid a lot of that. To put this on, basically what you want to do is have the edge up as close to the gap as possible. Now for tape placement, what we want to do is put the tape edge as close as we can to the gap. Press down with your fingers to make sure you have a good grip. Also, don't leave the tape dangling off the edges. Your thumb's great at wrapping that around the corners. So next, we're going to be removing all of our faceplates in the room. These include electrical outlets, light switches, cable phone jacks, because we don't want to be painting over this as we're doing our mural. Now some people like to put more of our good old blue painters tape over the outlets as well to cover them up. I don't like doing that, I usually find that the protection is not and there's a much easier way rather than doing all that taping. Namely getting a good flathead screwdriver and taking the face plate off here. Basically put the flathead into the screw, start spinning counter clockwise until it comes loose, and you remove the faceplate. Next, I am going to use some blue tape to cover up the remaining outlet here. Usually one strip will do it, kind of tuck it around to where it's still covering up the metal but not the wall because you want to be able to paint all the wall surface that you can. Tuck it underneath there, make sure it's a good seal. There you go. You can go over this with a whole brush and your still going to be fine when you take that tape off. Just a few more things to cover before we can actually start painting. One of these is putting a drop cloth down. This is like protecting all of your carpet area by having your drop cloth. These come in actual cloth, more commonly now days, they come in a nice clear plastic. So, you unfold this which it'll unfold many, many different times, and you'll be able then to cover up your carpet area. Now again, there are different styles here. Some people will just leave it like this, other folks will actually want to more directly stick the drop cloth to the wall to make sure that it stays because it can drift when you're walking over it. It can definitely get snagged and pull away from the wall. But make sure your carpet is entirely covered, that'll protect your carpet from the paint and you're ready for the creative process to begin."