What are the benefits of having a professional painter paint your home?
What is the quickest and most affordable way to transform your home and instantly improve its value? The answer is simple.
There is no other home improvement that has the potential to overhaul your home in a short time like painting it. For around $2,000, you can completely change your home’s appearance and bring its style up to date. Beyond simply improving its aesthetics, a fresh coat of paint will also do the following for your home:
- Protect it: Paint creates a protective barrier that keeps moisture, dust, insects, microorganisms, and corrosives away from the surfaces of your home.
- Maintenance: Repainting your home offers you a chance to find and fix defects on the building’s surfaces.
- Prevent obsolescence: If a house is old, you can keep it from looking out of place by upgrading its paint.
- Protect market value: A fresh coat of paint will make your home more appealing and valuable to buyers.
Should you paint your home by yourself or hire a professional painter?
Painting decorative white stone in the form of a brick with paint. Credit: Henadzi Pechan.
Given the impact that paint has on your home’s appearance and overall value, what is the best way to handle this project? Is it a good idea to paint your home by yourself? Or should you hire a professional painter to do it? Will painting the house by yourself have any long-term effects on the appearance of your home and its market value?
To answer the questions, perhaps we should first ask why some homeowners think they should paint their homes by themselves.
For most homeowners who choose to paint their homes themselves, there are two reasons:
- They have their eyes on the cost of hiring a professional painter. The painter is seen as a cost to be avoided instead of a long-term investment.
- Secondly, some homeowners view house painting as a fun activity that anyone can do. They think of it as no different from what kids do with colors on canvas.
But this kind of thinking misses a vital point: choosing paint colors and applying them to the surface of a building is less than 25% of the process of painting a house. More than 75% of the process of painting a house takes place before you even pick up a brush to apply a coat of paint to the building’s surface.
Surface preparation is the most important part of painting a house.
Surface preparation makes up more than 75% of the process of painting the surfaces in your home. Surface preparation involves steps professional painters take to make a surface ready to receive paint. Surface preparation aims to ensure that paint adheres properly to the surface. Poor surface preparation is the main reason paint fails prematurely.
What does a professional painter do during the surface preparation? This depends on the nature of the surface being painted and the type of paint. There is no single preparation technique or procedure which may be universally applied to all surfaces. The painter must base his or her technique on the type of surface and its physical condition.
Peeling Paint. Photo Credit: Hal Gatewood on Unsplash.
That being said, here are the most common stages of surface preparation.
- Pressure wash: This first step uses a jet stream of water to blast away dirt, dust, mold, flaking paint, algae, and other surface impurities.
- Scraping: This labor-intensive process involves scraping the surface to manually remove any impurities that remain after pressure washing.
- Surface repair: Pressure washing and scraping processes will reveal weak, rotten, or damaged spots on the surface that need to be repaired.
- Caulking and sanding: Caulk and filler are applied to seal imperfections and create an even surface. The entire surface is then sanded to smooth it.
- Priming: Applying primer is the final part before the actual painting. It ensures that the final paint job will look perfect even if there are uneven colored patches on the surface.
It is easy to see why you need a professional painter to paint your home from the above. Unless you follow this step-by-step process, there will be dust, dirt, old paint, and other impurities caught between the new coat of paint and the surface. This will prevent proper adhesion and can lead the paint to start to peel, blister, or flake.
But this is not the only reason to hire a professional house painter to improve your home. A professional painter can save you money by providing the following benefits.
Benefits of hiring a professional painter to paint your home
Professional advice
Perhaps the hardest part of painting a home for most homeowners is deciding what color scheme to use. A professional painter can help you wade through the thousands of options by pointing you in the direction of the colors buyers like most or what will work best for your home. The painter will put the benefits of their years of experience at your disposal.
You get a beautiful home done to perfection.
Unlike when you paint your home by yourself, you can expect perfect lines when hiring a professional painter. You will not have issues with roller marks or brush lines showing in the paintwork with a professional painter. This matters because the small details determine the quality of a paint job.
Moreover, even if you want something intricate in the design, a professional painter will execute it perfectly. When you paint your home yourself, you must limit yourself to the simplest designs. But when you hire a professional painter, you can unleash your imagination.
Warranty
One of the biggest reasons not to paint your home by yourself is if there is a problem with the paint, you will bear the cost of fixing it. It is different when you hire a professional painter with a stated warranty. If you notice any issues with the work or the paint shows signs of trouble, you can have the painter fix the problems at no extra cost.
Save time and keep safe.
Especially when painting the exterior of your house or the upper surfaces of rooms, there is a risk of injuries. You can avoid this by hiring a professional. Additionally, most homeowners underestimate how long it takes to paint a house. They take more time than they planned and spend more money than they budgeted. A professional painter will minimize the disruption to your life by finishing right on time.
No hassles with cleaning-up
House painting creates a lot of mess, and cleaning up the mess can be as hard as painting the house itself. This is the worst part of their experience when painting their home for most amateur house painters. Professional painters have a system for minimizing mess during a paint job, and they know how to accelerate the cleanup. The work will be done in no time, and the professional painter will return your home to you in pristine condition.
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