How to Paint a Room (w/ Monica from The Weekender)

sure that many of you have painted before but i'm guessing that some of you haven't and that's why you're here to learn how to do it right so i'm going to give you some pro tips i'm going to give some tips for beginners and walk you through every step of the process as simply as possible so that when you're done you love your new space as you can tell we're all prepped to paint in this bedroom and if you haven't checked out my how to prep a room for paint video you might want to check it out right here prep is a step that's often overlooked but it's super important our holes are patched our trim is taped our floors are protected this room is ready to go and for this project i'm going to be painting the walls and the trim so let's start off by telling you how to choose a paint color and sheen i always recommend going to lowe's and grabbing a bunch of swatches in a color you like and bringing them home with you to see them in your actual space they're going to look different than they do in the store because the lighting in your room will be different i like to tape them to the wall with painters tape and leave them there for a few days before i start the project so i can see the colors at all different times of day with all different lighting once i choose my favorite color i also grab a couple swatches that are a few shades lighter and a few shades darker if i want to go a little darker or a little bit lighter i already have options that are in the same color family for this room i chose valspar's juniper breeze it's a green color but it isn't overly warm or too greeny it actually almost reads like a green gray and i want the trim to look super clean and crisp so i'm going with valspar's ultra white okay so we have your paint color now for the sheen for our purposes in this room we're going to be using a flat finish for the walls this is awesome for a beginner painter because it hides a lot of imperfections then we're going to be using a semi gloss for all the trim this is kind of a go-to for any window casings doors trim because it's super washable and it's also going to be more reflective because of the higher gloss so it draws your eye to it making your paint job look awesome [Music] so i've picked my paint color i've figured out my sheens and now i need to determine how much paint i need for this room the average gallon of paint will cover about 400 square feet of wall space so we got to do a little math to figure out how much wall space i have okay so my friend matt is a painter and he's helping me figure out exactly what the square footage of the walls are so matt how what are we dealing with here well we got a 14 by 12 room top with eight foot ceilings there's 416 square foot of wall space here minus your doors your entrance door your closet door and your window behind us okay so 416 minus all that we're well under four one gallon is perfect for this room one gallon is all we need all right so what about the trim there's 104 linear feet in this room okay so that includes like our baseboards around our doors around the windows all of that correct so one gallon of trim paint usually can cover three to four hundred linear feet so we're well under that you're perfect we have plenty of extra and that you always do two coats right yes now if this is sounding a little complicated if math isn't your thing no worries there's an awesome easy to use lowe's calculator it can help you calculate how much wall paint you need or how much trim paint how to subtract outdoors and windows they make it really easy for you okay so now we're on to opening the can this one's pretty easy and you can actually use a variety of different tools to do the job many homeowners will use a flathead screwdriver or if you have your five in one tool you could use that you even can reach into your back pocket and use a quarter around the edge now no matter which tool you choose to use the biggest thing is that you want to make sure that you are opening all the way around the can on all the sides so i'm gonna go with my five in one and i'm just gonna use one hand to securely hold the gallon and the other is going to put the five and one just under the lip i'm to slip it in and then kind of torque it backwards a bit and we have it off and there's no damage done to the can at all so i picked up this paint two days ago and you can kind of tell that the tint and the base have separated a little bit and i want to make sure that i have nice consistent coverage so i'm going to use my complimentary from lowe's paint stir stick and i'm going to put this all the way to the bottom of my gallon and i'm going to slowly stir it up together you want to make sure that the base and the tint that they put in to create your custom color are perfectly mixed together so we're going to be painting the walls first this is a preference thing i talked about this in my how to prep room for paint video that is kind of hotly debated do you paint the walls first or the trim first for an everyday kind of beginner homeowner i'm going to recommend that you do the walls first and here's why sometimes when you're rolling you might get some splatter to come off your roller onto your trim so i've taped off the trim right now and then that'll be the second thing that we do that way it ensures that the final touches are clean crisp awesome trim it'll make your entire paint job look great for this space we're using a paint plus primer so that means we don't need to do a primer coat beforehand now there's a few circumstances where you might need to if you're dealing with fresh drywall or if you have some stains that you really need to block out then maybe a primer would be a good option we're going to start by cutting in and what that refers to is really focusing on the edges in the corner of the room using a paintbrush we're going to do that before we roll the walls since we're going to be cutting in and working our way around the room i like to transfer some of my paint into like a little handy bucket and it even has a liner in here for easy cleanup so i'm going to transfer just some of my gallon into my pail and we'll start cutting in if you have a space large enough and you think you'll definitely need at least two gallons of paint i recommend boxing this is a technique to ensure color consistency between different gallons of paint you'll take a five gallon bucket and mix then stir your paint together this way if there's any slight difference in color between the gallons it won't matter when it's all combined to form one uniform color [Music] for my brush when i'm cutting in i prefer to use a two inch angled brush now again this is preference but the angle allows me to control the paint a bit more so when i'm coming into a spot where like my wall hits my ceiling or my walls hit my trim i can be more precise with the paint now when you are getting ready to cut in you're going to take your brush and you want to load it with paint now a common mistake is to overload your paint to dip it in like many many inches and just have paint all over so what you want to do is you want to dip in and you only want to get paint on the first inch of your brush or so after you've dipped in the paint you're going to basically drag it along the edge of your can just to offload it just offload a little bit on each side okay we are finally ready to get some paint on the walls and before i do it i have a couple more tips for you first of all is how do you hold a paintbrush and i know that seems basic but let me tell you i've seen a few people with the fist method and it doesn't work very well so the way i like to do it is i use my pointer finger as kind of my control and my guide the same way that you would almost holding a pencil and then resting my other fingers back here on the back side the only things you want to keep in mind is that you want it to be comfortable for you you want to have good control of your brush and you don't want to grip it too tight okay so i'm dipping i'm offloading and i'm going to start painting in a corner that's kind of the easiest space now when i'm painting i'm getting pretty good coverage when it starts getting spotty like that you know you don't have enough paint on your brush it's time to load also if i were going like this that's too much paint right there if i get too much paint on i just want to use my brush and help feather it out when i'm cutting this in i roughly want to go about three inches out from the corner in both directions this way when i come through with my roller my roller can cover my edge line but not get so close that it bangs the other wall now i'm going to move down to my baseboard and because we taped off our baseboards my technique isn't quite as critical it's not like i'm cutting in and need to have a perfectly straight line it's okay to get paint on your tape that was the whole idea around the windows same deal as the trim they're taped off so you don't have to worry about your brush touching another tip when you're finished in a section you want to really give it a good once-over you want to make sure that there's no drips or globs there's so much easier to fix when they're wet so hit them with a brush if they dry then you're getting into sanding potentially spackling and basically we're all the way back at how to prep a room for paint we're focusing on cutting in all around our windows our door frames and our baseboards and we're saving the ceiling for last matt's gonna show you how to cut in like a pro so matt is up here and he is cutting in and dang that looks straight okay so what does it take to get this perfect cut line well it helps having a good angled brush a new brush would be great you just want to follow your tip along the wall meets the ceiling with a steady hand as slow as possible and just reach until you're out of paint and then move down and if you ever get anything on the ceiling keep a wet rag with you just wipe it off and you should be good to go the one thing that i highly recommend is don't overload your brush with too much paint you do not want to have too much on your top that it globs up onto your ceiling so you always want to just have a nice little line and then when you're done just fan it downwards so you don't wrap it onto your ceiling line all right so we're totally cut in and now we can finally move on to the walls and to do that we're going to be using a paint roller a roller is made up of two parts basically you have your roller cage and then your roller cover which is sometimes referred to as a roller head and these two combine together to become your roller not all roller heads are the same so we want to go over some of the basic most like average homeowner ones that you might see and need to use well you have three eighth nap right here it's great for walls and ceilings smooth surfaces drywall most homeowner projects perfect you want a little more thicker for maybe a larger room you can maybe your fan room's a little bigger something along those lines you have a half fin snap which will hold more paint and then you really get into the three fourth nap that holds a ton you do it for your stucco decks masonry anywhere you need to really get in your nooks and crannies you really get it in so matt's referring to the nap and that refers to the thickness of the roller cover so a three-quarters nap it's going to be a lot looser right and a thicker higher nap the rougher the surface the thicker the nap you want to use so it holds more paint and getting some more grooves so for this space we are going gonna go with the 3 8 inch nap another thing that you have some options in is actually the size of your cage and roller cover so this is a 9 inch which is kind of typical for a bedroom but roller cages do come in a variety of sizes they have two inch and four inch which are great for doors and smaller surfaces and even larger ones like 14 and 18 if you're doing a really big project okay we're going to be rolling these walls and working out of a paint tray now the one thing to remember when you're choosing your tray is to make sure that it's the correct size for your roller once you have your tray make sure that you also pick up a liner make sure it's the same brand so that they correspond and fit in together but this is going to make your cleanup so much easier you guys will thank me later basically you want to take it up to this top line okay for loading your roller here's what we're going to do you're going to dip it down into the paint but resist the temptation to fully submerge it i know that it is tempting you're gonna roll back and forth to load up the paint it's gonna take a couple rolls on the wall to fully saturate your roller and get it going it almost needs like a couple passes to warm up so i'll take it out and i'll go roll how to roll a wall is a hotly debated topic it probably always will be so we're gonna show you a couple common techniques and explain how to do them and why people do them and then you can choose the technique that works best for you all right so the first one is the v or the w depends on who you ask so this is kind of a basic homeowner technique is that it offloads your paint kind of across the section right instead of in one area exactly kind of just want to roll it out so you get rid of the w or v that you had technique number two is going to be full strokes top to bottom working your way over yeah so you just do up and down long strokes body length just so everything blends in together and once again making sure you don't have any lines that overlap each other so you'll just do a light pressure that's it just going up and down like that if you put too much pressure on you'll start to get gloves there's one more technique that's pretty common and that's kind of blocking it top to bottom this is basically the same method as we just did with the top to bottom all the way ceiling to floor except you're gonna work in two sections exactly see leave it like that in one section and then complete and you're going back over kind of blending those two correct you want everything to blend so you don't have any lines that overlap each other so you can tell we just use three different methods w top to bottom and then blocking but it all looks the same so the moral of the story is pick your preference choose your technique but as long as you're ending up with a great finished product it doesn't matter which technique you use [Music] another common error is kind of having a roller line this just means that you had too much paint either on your edge or that you're applying a little bit too much pressure and you're going to end up with a bit of a ridge of paint the biggest thing is to fix it while it's still wet so to get rid of it we're just going to take a pretty dry roller much less paint and roll right over that with light pressure that way your ridge disappears okay so this area here is super common it's what we call a holiday and you can see it's just where the paint didn't go on quite evenly you're just going to back roll right over it blending it into the paint around it this one's pretty obvious but other times you can't even really notice it on the first coat so the second coat will take care of it all [Music] all right our walls are done and now it's on to trim but first we need to remove our tape and we're going to show you how to do it some people like to remove it right away this has dried a little bit it really doesn't matter again it's a preference thing the biggest thing is that when you're removing your tape you pull it evenly and slowly so that it doesn't catch and ruin your paint job [Music] all right we're getting ready to paint our trim and matte one around the perimeter of the room and laid a strip of masking tape this will protect the carpet and also press the carpet down just a bit so we can fully paint the trim it's a good time to mention to you guys that there's a difference between masking tape and painters tape what i'm about to show you is using painters tape he used masking tape i'm going to show you how to tape off your walls as an optional step matt and i are actually going to cut in this room so we can show you that too but if any of you want to tape it off i'm going to show you the process i would use need to wait until your paint is fully dried and cured we're putting it directly on the wall resting right where it meets the return of the trim you don't actually have it on the trim at all it's just meeting it and all the tape is on the wall and then the part that we care about sealing the most is right here along the trim and if you want you can use your five and one tool to kind of seal that in all right so we're ready to paint the trim i have my interior semi-gloss extra white here in my handy pail and i have another two inch angled brush a clean brush totally fresh all right hopefully you guys have checked out our how to prep a room for paint video so you know that we have already cleaned and removed all the dust from this trim and from the baseboard otherwise it could be a really yucky paint job so make sure you don't skip that step if you were to paint over dust especially in the corners it can just really muck it up so what i like to do is basically put my brush here just letting some of my bristles go up top under the return and with a smooth even stroke okay get that and then i work my way down okay and then when you go to paint the thicker direction i keep a straight brush and this is why we taped off nice smooth strokes there [Music] [Applause] all right my paint job is done i'm thrilled with how it's looking but i just want to show you guys how i put away my paint before i clear everything out of here so i have my wall paint here i take my lid put it on the top and i use a rubber mallet i don't like to use a metal hammer because it can damage the edge and then your seal isn't great i work my way around the edge i'm applying firm pressure but you don't want to go too crazy on it not too hard you don't want to dent the can and then one little pro tip i like to use a sharpie marker and label the room and what it was for so on this one i'm gonna write bedroom number two and the walls right on the lid and then that way i know exactly what it is also if i ever wanted to know the color that i used in this room because people are gonna love it so much they're gonna ask me what the color is it's right there on top and that my friends is the right way to paint a room i hope you learned a lot and that you're super excited to have your own properly painted room that you love got questions or comments leave them below and remember do it right start with lowe's wanna learn more be sure to check out the lowe's youtube channel for great step-by-step and how-to videos and lowes.com howto for all kinds of projects

Channel: Lowe's Home Improvement

Views: 3,272,020

Keywords: how, to, diy, lowe's, lowes, how-to, how to paint a room, painting a room, tips for painting a room, painting tips, how to paint a wall, painting, how to paint, painting walls, paint a room, painting rooms, how to paint a room professionally, how to paint a room video, paint room, steps to painting a room, how do you paint a room, steps to painting a wall, monica mangin, the weekender, east coast creative

Id: Prp1Kt0XNkY

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 16 2019