How We Prep A House For Exterior Painting (2023) | Great Plains Painting

The last 3 or four weeks we wrote about what we feel is required and recommended prep work before any exterior painting for houses in Overland Park and Kansas City. The point we’ve been subtly (or not so subtly) hinting at is that prep work is REALLY important. In our opinion, it does not make sense to spend your money, use a high quality paint, and hire a company but not get good prep work. Proper preparation before painting your house will increase the life of your painting project and have it looking the nicest it can look.

To recap, we covered:

  1. Peeling Paint
  2. Caulking
  3. Tiger Striping this is something unique to us

This covers the major prep work items. There is prep work we didn’t dedicate a whole blog post to, like power washing. Of course some homes in Overland Park will have special cases and require specific additional prep work. If your home is one of those, that is best handled at the estimate via discussion and formulation of a plan by you and our estimator.

The last step in getting your home ready to paint then, is to make sure we aren’t getting paint where it isn’t supposed to go.

Protecting Non Painted Surfaces

We wrote two posts about how we apply exterior paint to homes in Overland Park previously:

And in both those articles we talked about using airless spray equipment to apply the paint to the siding. Airless sprayers are great, but they require non-painted surfaces to be properly protected.

We DO NOT want to get paint on:

  • your brand new windows
  • brick chimneys or non-painted brick surfaces
  • your back deck or front porch
  • anywhere it’s not supposed to go

We are using primarily water based paints today, so if we do get a little paint where it isn’t supposed to go it can be cleaned up easily with water and therefore it isn’t the end of the world. But the easier thing to do is cover non-painted surfaces so they get no paint on them at all.

Windows

If the windows on your home are metal wrapped or vinyl casement, our recommendation is that they shouldn’t be painted. Even with Sherwin Williams stickiest primer, EXtreme Bond, problems with peeling are likely to occur. We keep paint off the windows by completely covering them with 6ft or 9ft plastic. We tape the plastic to the outermost edge of the window with blue or white tape, and voila, no paint gets on the windows.

Decks, Porches, Sidewalks, Driveways

To protect these surfaces, we use tape and 12” paper right where they meet the surface we are going to spray. The tape allows us to achieve a nice clean line at the bottom of the sprayed surface. Now generally, 12” of paper isn’t quite enough to protect from overspray and therefore we pull a drop cloth over the edge of the paper to give us more than adequate protection.

Roof

This process is similar to that of decks and porches. We’ll use a combination of drop cloths and tape/paper or shielding to make sure no paint gets on the roof shingles.

Lawns and Plants

We are as careful and cautious as we can be around plants. If we’re working in the area we throw a drop cloth over what we can. We don’t want to leave a drop cloth over the plants too long either, as that can be harmful to the as well. If our painters have setup a work space in the lawn, we throw a drop cloth underneath it.

Exterior House Painting Time

Once we’ve completed all our prep work, to me personally, it seems like the painting is actually the easy part. The home being painted starts to really come together after we complete the prep work. Completing a great prep job means our team is able to focus solely on making the paint look great.

Once we complete painting the house, we remove all the protective paper and plastic. When this is complete it’s time to inspect the home. There are always touchups to catch and complete, but at this stage the remaining painting is usually minimal.

Every Overland Park Home is Different

We understand that no two homes we paint are exactly the same. Also, you may have unique needs or requests and we incorporate those into your project. While the last several blog posts have been about what is common between homes we paint, don’t take this information as everything that is possible.

When we estimate an exterior painting project in Overland Park or Kansas City, we take our time and capture the scope of work you want completed and what is important to you as clearly and accurately as we can. We use written notes on our contract as well as pictures with a fancy app so that we can relay what exactly you want down the line from our estimator to our project manager to our painters.

As always, if you have specific questions about an exterior painting project in Overland Park, please give us a call, schedule an estimate with us, or if you’re getting an estimate pick our estimator’s brain about what it is that you want.