How to Paint a Door: Preparing the Area

Video Transcript

"Okay, in this next clip, I want to talk about preparing the area that you're going to be painting in. Now, if you've got a lot of time and you know no body's going to be using that door, that's always better. But if somebody might be using that door, coming in and out or something like that, you want to make them aware of that. Basically we've got this house pretty free so we know nobody's going to be coming in and out as it dries, but you can always put a chair with a note on each side of it and let them know that painting is going on, wet paint, because you don't want to ruin a blouse or a business suit or anything like that. The next thing is, of course, clearing out your area. Now, we've got a China cabinet here and because we're painting and it is a little bit aways, I'm not too worried about it. But you ca always take a drop cloth and cover it with a drop cloth and cover it so that it's protected. The other thing is to clear out things. We've got a rug on the floor, so I'm actually going to take the rug and pick it up and discard it out of the way. Now, a drop cloth is, you get them at paint stores, very inexpensive, but they are ideal. You don't want to use a newspaper, you don't want to use a sheet, simply because paint can seep through those items. A drop cloth, a painter's drop cloth, is specifically designed to do just that, to be a drop cloth. For the paint to drop onto, hit, dry and not seep through. And what you want to do is, there's some really neat drop cloths. I've got one that's actually about four foot by twelve foot, and I can actually spread this one out and cover the entire doorway and the opening of the door. So what I'll do is simply come in here, stretch it out, cover the doorway, make sure it's completely covered, and I can go ahead and close my door. Now once I get this things spread out, I can actually take another drop cloth, like I had talked about, cover up my China cabinet, and finish off that space that this one doesn't cover. Now we'll move about as we go and make sure that our whole space is covered, so that whatever we're doing, our paint is sitting on our drop cloth, we're on our drop cloth, and the door underneath is covered with the drop cloth."