Toronto painting blog

This was a downtown Toronto house renovation that ended up having extra painting work added in during the final stages. As the project was wrapping up and everything was starting to take shape, it felt like the finished product would lack those nice final touches if we didn’t go the extra mile. One of things that fit into the extras was the house’s exterior front door awning.

They had an attachment to the outside awning of this house and we were to restore the wood to its natural state before staining it. There was a significant amount of paint on it, probably ten years worth of paint. With layers of paint like that you have to be patient. The approach I choose was a two prong paint removal attack. I was going to use paint stripper and also have a heat gun by my side. With a job like this you want to be able to be flexible. Some paint will respond to one method of removal better then the other, I find the initial layer tends to bubble up and come off quicker then the less weathered or penetrated deeper layers of paint. For those layers I used the heat gun along side the remover in succession. I needed my reserve of elbow grease to finish this one off, the paint doesn’t come off by itself .. unless they had a pretty bad painter paint it before. Say that ten times fast!

After drywall has been laid and it has been plastered. A primer sealer is highly recommended. Essentially this is the absolute last stage in home building. Left without primer plaster will eventually corrode and chip or break away and drywall has a porous paper layer. It’s typical to see drywall without primer in garage and basement areas. It can work occasionally but in any areas with traffic and humidity it could play risk.

When priming drywall you also want to prime for the your coat of paint. If you chose not to prime the new drywall then the paint will not adhere properly to the surface, it may stay on the wall but when it “challenged” it will more than likely scratch and/or show it’s lack of adhesion.

When you decide to repaint your condo, house, office, etc you may need primer again. One reason is when patching nail holes or other minor holes you will need to prime those little patches of plaster or filling agent. If the patches are not primed then they will flash; meaning that there is a visibly a slight difference between patch and the surface area around the patch. The difference generally shows itself as a difference in sheen, the patch will appear “flatter” as the surface is rougher.

The only issue can be predicting which primer to use. You should generally use a lower-end value brand for this. If you choose a high-end primer you may be sealing the surface and doing the exact opposite by producing a glossier sheen difference. This is due to the strength of the primer. If it is a very potent mixture it will seal the area of the wall creating a less porous area and thus a glossier surface for the finish paint.

Another consideration when choosing a primer to repaint is your final paint colour choice. The challenge here is going from very contrasting paint colours. For instance if your wall colour is yellow and you want to go purple then you may want to use a colour tinted primer. A tinted primed is typically a lower-grade primer with colour added. One reason for this is that primer is formulated to hide the surface it is going over, another reason is primer can be cheaper than your finish paint and the initial primer coat is a step towards the finish paint colour. So instead of three coats of paint that is generally more expensive than primer, you can do at least one with your tinted primer and get by with less paint usage overall. The question comes down to whether or not the pigments in the paint is of a high opacity.

In older homes however you may need to prime all the surface before painting, because you can never be to sure about the substrate and what type of paint or substance is on any of the numerous layer of paint. For instance, When applying latex over oil/alkyd based paint you’ll always want to apply a primer suited for this purpose.

Water damage is an area where primer is made to block the water. When dealing with water damage you want to assess the cause before moving forward with the paint job. Painting can only do so much and some times the job will need to be reffered to a general contractor who can fix the source of the water damage. If the problem is fixed then a cautionary water block primer wouldn’t hurt.

Some areas where primer is used include areas with marked with markers or crayon. Some of these tools can leave a nasty mark on the wall that is extremely visible through multiple layers of paint, sometimes the only way to fix these areas is literally cut them out of the wall and re-plaster. Usually this can be rectified with the right pre-paint primer application if cleaning them proves futile.

On this deck staining job we were applying a solid stain to this deck and the surrounding lattice. The first step was to eliminate any ‘mill glaze’ as well as prepare the surface for staining. Mill glaze comes from new wood, the wood is ‘mill glazed’ during the process of chopping the wood, when the blade touches the wood it will give it a ‘glaze’. Mill glaze is widely accepted but some people have a differing opinion.

The flat deck surfaces are paid special attention, these surfaces are given a good sanding with a power sander. The sanding will break up the mill glaze and the initial layer of wood to allow the stain to saturate deep inside, providing a great deck stain finish. The mill glaze effect can also be remedied by leaving the wood to “sit” for a year after it came from the mill, this allows the environment and time to wear down the mill glaze. After the sanding we vacuumed up as much wood dust as we could as well as used the blow setting to get any other pesky dust particles out of the way, leaving us with a perfect deck surface ready to be stained.

Stain is unlike paint in many ways. If the deck stain is not applied correctly the stain will just not look right. Paint can be applied where some areas have a slight overlap creating a tiny extra coat on this overlap and you wouldn’t be able to see the difference. Providing that the paint is of a high hide and very opaque by nature. On the otherhand, deck stain allows you to see every layer. So you want to coat an area with one application as best as possible. If it needs a second then you do the same thing do the whole area uniformly. Areas that do happen to get a little extra may produce a stronger color or different sheen.

You can see in the stain application video above how the boards of the deck are being stained. If you notice we stain only the individual boards one at a time. This systematic approach to applying the stain ensures we apply an even coat to each board. If we stained the boards without such precision chances are very good there would be an overlap. This stain overlap would appear as a difference in the deck stain’s sheen, in other words it would appear to be a little more glossy on the overlap. To finish off a board its best to run your brush along the whole board in one stroke to eliminate any other brush marks and get a uniform finish. On this deck stain site we sprayed all vertical surfaces such as lattice, extremely reducing the amount of time and labour required as well as providing a flawless finish. At the end of the above stain application video you can see the finished results.

Painting houses you will certainly encounter a lot of doors!

When painting a door it is important paint systematically in order to hide your brush strokes. Doors are a focal point as they obviously designate entries and people are always looking for or at them. Compared to some walls in houses, a door is rarely stuffed away in the corner and hidden from your sight. Doors are in plain view. One of the most obvious flaws on a door is brush marks. Roller marks can be troublesome too. The goal when painting a door is to use your brush first then roll with a foam roller over the larger open areas covering all the brush marks.

In this example the top of the door is being painted here. First you paint the “wells”, the area in between the square areas. Then you roll the small square and then the areas around the square’s. When you roll you will cover up the brush marks that are outside of the “wells” around the square’s. The opposite way would be to roll first then brush. If you would choose to do this then your last work you would see so there would be brush marks around those square areas.

Another example is around the door handle. You would want to brush around the handle then go as close as you could with your roller. Often people also use a brush only with doors and that is very acceptable. That is reserved for a skilled painter he would still want to stick to a plan to hide the strokes or make the brush strokes consistent. Here he would use his brush to go with the grain or length of the door panel.

Painting a door can be done quickly and with practice you will become a skilled technician.

This is an example of an 18 inch roller in action priming a stairwell. This house was under renovation and so we were able to use an airless sprayer to paint nearly everything. Occasionally other trades are present in the house so some areas can not be spray painted at that time. Here we are quickly finishing up the first coat of primer to all areas. Our third and final coat will also applied with an 18 inch roller on this house painting project.

Depending on how the other trades involved in the work are scheduled, we may hold off on doing the final coat of paint until the majority of their work is finished. This is typically because the surface is damaged slightly by the traffic from other trades carrying tools and doing their installations; not to say they are careless but it is quite common that touch-ups are needed before the project is finished.