Redecorating

Requirements.

• Polycell basecoat (anti-crack).

• Heat gun.

• Medium flex scraper (for heat gun).

• Frog tape (total blockout, semi blockout).

• Ladder.

• Several different widths of brush.

• Topcoat paint.

• White spirits.

• Several different widths of rollers.

• Adjustable spanner.

• Low profile tub X2.

• Flathead and Philips screwdriver.

• Polyfill.

• Sandpaper (coarse and fine grain).

• Sugar soap.

• Sponge.

• Radiator bleed key.

When anyone moves into a new house, one of the first changes that comes to mind, is repainting the common areas. This, I believe, helps to give the house a sense of belonging to you, putting your own stamp on it.

If I had just one bit of advice to give when painting, it would be DO THE PREP!! If you put the time in at the start for the preparation, the whole process goes a heck of a lot easier and you end up with a much more professional finish at the end.

This is my step by step guide, obviously this is specific to my house, but I hope you can cut and paste the bits you find useful.

• Clear the area.

  • Sounds like a basic step but clear all furniture away from the walls. This is so that you can easily get access, esp in the crouching position when painting. If the furniture can’t be removed from the room, clear the objects away from the walls into the centre of the room and cover with a sheet.

Early stages of the bar conversion

• Remove fixed items.

  • Hooks from walls.

  • Curtains and curtain rails.

  • Doors and hinges.

    • A big peeve of mine is not being bothered to take off the doors and hinges (if you’re painting the trims around the doors) and just painting over everything. Every single one of our 37 internal doors had had its hinges caked in paint. These are stunning handmade hinges, which I have subsequently, painfully, removed all the paint from and rehung. I will post a separate blog on hinge stripping.

  • Remove radiators.

    • Ensure central heating is off.

    • Turn off both taps into all radiators in the room your prepping.

    • Choose one side of the radiator you wish to loosen and place the low-profile tub under the bolt.

    • Loosen the bolt (not that much water should come out as there will be a vacuum formed within the radiator).

    • With the radiator bleeding key, open one of the valves at the top of the radiator. If you do this slowly the water will steadily start to flow out.

    • Once your tub starts to get full, close the valve at the top again, swap over the tubs and start again. Do this until the radiator is empty.

    • Unscrew the bolt at the opposite side of the radiator.

    • With someone helping you, lift the radiator off the wall. Always keep your thumb over the openings at the bottom of the radiator as small amounts of water might come out while you carry it.

    • Remove the brackets from the wall that the radiator was hung on.

Dining room with all fixtures removed from walls

• Prepare the surfaces.

  • Using polyfill, fill all holes (except the holes that are used for the radiator brackets, as you will reuse these same holes later) and leave to dry (I normally leave this overnight).

  • Sand all areas that have been polyfilled. Depending on how thick you have applied the polyfill, either with the coarse sandpaper first and then the fine grain, or just with the fine.

  • Wipe down all surfaces with a dry cloth.

  • Wipe down all surfaces with a sugar soap solution.

• Loosen, but not remove, light switches and plug sockets (If you are unsure with electrics, always ask an electrician)

  • TURN OFF THE POWER at your fuse box for the light switches and plug sockets.

  • Unscrew casing on the light switches and plug sockets only. There is no need to unscrew the power cables as well as you are only painting around the areas (so they don’t need to be fully removed).

• Paint the basecoat.

  • Our house is very old, so it’s prone to cracking plaster and we wanted to partially paint some of the wooden wall panels. I initially used a specific undercoat paint that you can paint over varnish with (if I hadn’t I would have needed to sand all the panels, which would have taken forever). However, this was pretty expensive and took a couple of coats. I subsequently found Polycell basecoat, which I could use on the varnished wood and at the same time it worked on the walls and ceiling (what it’s was designed for) as a base coat (almost two years on and no new cracks have appeared in what I painted).

• Tape.

  • Now I am never one to say that you need to buy the most expensive equipment to do a job (I am from Yorkshire after all). However, through trial and error, I have learnt some things that it’s just better not to scrimp on. In the long run you either end up doing the job multiple times or the finish just isn't quite as sharp as you would want it to be. I found that with using a general purpose painters tape, there would be quite a bit of bleeding of the paint afterwards. I therefore used Frogtape, which creates a really good seal for paint. There are different strengths for different types of paint, each with a different adhesive ability.

• Paint!!

  • If you’re painting different colours in different sections on the wall and ceiling, always go for painting the lightest colour first and then work around that. For example,

    • My ceiling is painted off-white and my cornices are smoked glass (don’t ask me about the weird names that colours are given). I painted the full ceiling off-white (it didn’t matter if some of the white went onto the cornices as these would be painted a darker colour than the smoked glass). The same applied for the main colour on the walls, this was lighter than the cornice colour. I then only had to do one round of taping, on the wall and on the ceiling, for when I was painting the cornices.

Front room, before painting and floor laying and after