Emerald Professional Painters Painting Blog

Everything painting from expert Toronto reliable painters.

Emerald Professional Painters Painting Blog

Everything painting from expert Toronto painters.

Emerald Professional Painters Painting Blog

Everything painting from expert Toronto painters.

Emerald Professional Painters Painting Blog

Everything painting from expert Toronto painters.

Emerald Professional Painters Painting Blog

Everything painting from expert Toronto painters.

Monday 13 February 2017

When You Should Paint During a Home Renovation?

So, you’re planning a new painting project. Good for you! The right paint job can refresh, revitalize and renew any room in your home, or your entire home, for that matter. If you’re doing a home makeover or home improvement that involves more than just painting, however, you may have some questions about if paint should be applied first or last during your home renovation project.
Many people believe a painting project should always come first, before other home improvement jobs. And often you will want to apply your paint before you dive into other projects, especially if you’re getting new carpeting. Professional painters can take steps to protect your carpet, but if you’re going to replace the carpet anyway, you might as well do the painting with the carpet you’re going to get rid of.
However, the “paint-first” rule is not always the case. Professional painters have processes to keep your household items protected when painting, so you’re not obligated to do the painting before making any other big changes. In fact, there are some cases when paint should be applied after other home projects.
If you’re still wondering when should paint be applied during your home improvement process, here are some tips on applying paint from Nolan Painting, the residential and commercial painting experts in the Philadelphia area. These are cases where you will probably want to paint AFTER doing your project.

After Refinishing or Installing New Floors

Refinishing floors is a messy project and can raise dust, which may stick to new paint. In addition, baseboards and wall paint can be damaged during the refinishing process. By the same token, paint after installing a new tile floor.

After Remodeling

A kitchen or bathroom remodel can involve ripping out or installing new appliances or furnishings, a process that can easily damage your paint job. Do the other work first, so any paint chipping or damage can be painted over with the new paint job.

After Redecorating a Room

You don’t want to go through a whole paint job and then find your plans for the room don’t mesh with the new color. Figure out what you want the room to look like first, then compare shades to find just the right color match. Again, the painters will have no problem covering or moving and replacing new furnishings to protect them during the painting process.

Looking for more tips on applying new paint to your home or business?Interested in a free estimate on your painting job in the Toronto area? Get in touch with Emerald Painting, the residential and commercial painting company proudly serving the Greater Toronto Area with a reputation to get the painting project complete in time, and professionally the first time. Contact us online today.

Emerald Professional Painters Toronto provides professional residential painting services. We are Toronto Painting Contractors that paint the interior and exterior of your house. Visit our website at https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/ or Call us at 647.909.3946 for a free quote today!
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/whitby-house-painters for Whitby interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/ajax-house-painters for Ajax interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/pickering-house-painters for Pickering interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/scarborough-house-painters for Scarborough interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/clarington-house-painters for Clarington interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors

Sunday 12 February 2017

Prepare Rooms: Move Furniture!

Most of the information I have seen about painting around furniture while working on your interior house painting project tells you to move all of the furniture to the center of the room. This really is not very helpful. Think about a bedroom or living room. If you move all of the furniture to the middle of the room, you have created a huge obstacle to paint around. Even with the proper extension pole for your paint roller, such an obstacle in the center of the room is hard to work around. it is hard to reach over this obstacle to paint the ceiling.
What Interior House Painting Blog recommends is that you move the furniture away from the walls and arrange it with a few pieces in different areas of the room. This makes it easier to work around. Think of a chain of islands spread around the room rather than a huge continent in the center. Just make sure that you leave enough room between islands and walls to place a ladder next to them.
When moving furniture, practice safe lifting. Be careful not to injure your back. I would strongly suggest you follow this link to a tutorial on safe lifting practices:
http://www.cdc.gov/nasd/docs/d001601-d001700/d001607/d001607.html
Visit our website for more projects!
When moving furniture, take care not to damage it. Smaller light weight pieces of furniture can be picked up and moved. You may have to slide heavier pieces across the floor. Another thing to be very concerned about is the floor. Be careful not to scratch or cut any wooden or tile floors. Also, something that you may not think of is damage to carpet. Pushing or sliding heavy pieces of furniture across carpets can buckle the carpet, creating “hills and valleys” or lumps in carpet. What you need to do to avoid damage to any type of floor is to put large pieces of cardboard under the furniture and slide the furniture across the cardboard, thus protecting the floor. Visit a retail store to ask for some large, empty cardboard boxes and collapse the boxes to have a nice sheet of cardboard to slide the furniture over. Make sure the cardboard is thick enough, and be sure to remove any staples in the cardboard. Doing this at the beginning of your interior house painting project will avoid any damage to your floors.
You must also be very careful with any electrical outlets or switches in the room. You need to turn off the circuit breakers for the outlets in the room you are working on to avoid shock. Latex paint contains a lot of water, and everyone knows that water conducts electricity. Sometimes you may need to turn off more than one breaker for one room. A foolproof way to see if an outlet is off is to use a circuit tester. Inexpensive circuit testers may be purchased at any hardware store. Circuit testers consist of two wires or bars connected to a sealled light. If you plug the circuit tester into any outlet and it lights up, you will know you were not successful in turning off all electricity to the room you want to paint and you will have to to turn off the right breaker, perhaps several. After all of the electricity in the room is off, it is safe to remover the switch plates and outlet covers so as not to get any paint on them. Place all of the screws in a glass and be sure to place it somewhere that it will not be forgotten or knocked over.
You must cover all of your furniture with drop cloths. For this, use plastic sheets that you can buy at any paint or hardware store. Buy the thicker sheets. The thin sheets of plastic are hard to unfold and also tear easily. There are also drop cloths for your interior house painting job that are paper on one side and plastic on the other. These are also ideal for covering floors. You now know the best and the quickest way to set up a room to begin your interior house painting project.
Contact us by giving a call at 647.909.3946 https://www.emeraldpainting.ca

Remove Wallpaper: Interior Toronto and Durham Region House Painters

Nothing has changed in https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/ for some time. Now I will be adding a series of interior house painting instructionsas well as more information on the hazards of lead paint, wearing the proper respirator during painting projects and other safety precautions. I am beginning this series of articles with a post about removing wallpaper.
For this job you will need sheets of plastic drop cloths, a garden type sprayer, and a wallpaper scraper with a razor blade that can be changed when dull, or a spackle knife. The razor scraper is best used on plaster walls, the spackle knife on drywall (or sheet rock or gypsum board.) You can use the razor edge wallpaper removal tool on drywall, but the wallpaper must be thoroughly saturated with hot water containing vinegar so it can be razored off of the drywall without damaging it. For the plastic sheets, spend a little more money for the thicker kind. Don’t use the super cheap but super thin sheets, which are hard to open from the package and will tear and will not hold the weight of the removed wallpaper lying on them when you pick them up. The sprayer has a pump handle on top. You pump this handle and build up pressure, and do it again when the original pressure has gone down. You may have seen people spraying their garden with this type of sprayer. It is perfect for saturating the wallpaper you want to remove.
Before you do anything, go to the circuit breaker or fuse box to turn off the electricity in the room where you will be removing wallpaper. Move furniture away from the walls. Place the plastic sheeting at the base of the wall, right up against the baseboard. Make sure the carpet, tile or wood floor is completely covered to prevent water damage or glue mess on floor. Make sure also that all furniture that could possibly be hit with your sprayer is covered with plastic drop cloths.
Before you even fill the sprayer, score lines on the surface of wallpaper. Be careful not to go too deep and score the walls making extra repairs necessary. There are also tools available at the hardware or paint store made specifically for breaking the surface of the wallpaper so that the water solution can get under and through the wallpaper. These tools contain small wheels with spikes sticking out.
After all of the plastic is in place and the surface of the wallpaper is scored or “Broken,” the sprayer can be filled. DO NOT buy the expensive chemicals made for wallpaper removal. They are largely ineffective and can irritate skin. If you decide to use these chemicals, make sure you are wearing the right respirator to protect your breathing paths and lungs. I strongly recommend that you do NOT use them. Regular white vinegar works better than these chemicals, and vinegar is cheap. When filling your garden sprayer with vinegar and water, use a 2:1 solution, two parts water and one part vinegar. You should use the hottest water that you can. Don’t buy or rent a wallpaper steamer. They are dangerous and it is easy to get burned. You have to stand and hold them against the wall, only covering a very small area. Wallpaper steamers do not work. Hot water and vinegar is the way to go.
Now that your spraying combination is mixed in the sprayer, pump it up and spray all the walls in the room. At first the paper will soak up all the water and the wallpaper will look dry. As long as too much water is not running onto the plastic, you can immediately go all the way around the room again with the sprayer. Then go do something else for about twenty minutes. Return to the room and spray it one more time liberally. There will be water on the plastic, and as the wallpaper is scraped off there will be sheets of paper and glue, making for a very slippery condition. Be VERY CAREFUL walking on this slippery surface
Now that the wallpaper is saturated, you can use your razor scraper or spackling knife to start removing the paper. If it is very hard to scrape the wallpaper, wait. If it is too hard to get off, you need to spray the room again and WAIT a while, and it should come off easily. The paper and glue will eventually soften up with enough spraying and time.
After you have completely stripped off the wallpaper, it is time to get the glue off. Try to remove the glue as soon as possible after removing the wallpaper while the glue is very wet. You can use a wet rag followed with a clean, dry rag or towel. Keep turning the rags as they become saturated with glue. There may be too much glue to take off, in which case you may have to use your razor scraper or spackling blade to scrape off the glue. It may be a little difficult to remove the glue, but it is not nearly as hard as stripping the wallpaper, which you have already done. Now you can roll up the sheets of plastic full of stripped wallpaper and glue.
Let the wall dry thoroughly before painting. Fans will help this happen faster. When the wall is dry, you should apply an oil base primer/sealer on it. There are some good latex primer/sealer products, but for sure shot coverage, I use an oil based product. You have to wear a respirator to use oil base primer/sealers. These respirators are not cheap, but if you apply an oil base primer/sealer without a respirator you will get sick, dizzy and high. These products can also damage the nervous system, so WEAR A RESPIRATOR. You should actually wear a respirator no matter what type of paint you are using, but they are an absolute necessity when using an oil base primer/sealer. Always make sure to read the warnings, cautions and instructions on cans of paint. As you pour the paint, make sure not to cover these warnings, cautions and instructions on the back of paint cans. These warnings are for your safety and health, as well as anyone nearby. And don’t forget about pets, they can get sick and be harmed by some products. It is best if all people and pets be somewhere else when applying products like an oil base primer/sealer. When the primer is completely dry, the repairs can be started. Call us today at 647.909.3946!

Don't Paint Outside in the Fall!

Although this website is https://www.emeraldpainting.ca I feel compelled to warn against painting the exterior of a house or other structure in the fall. You might say “Why not? The weather is great for working outside, not hot and humid. It’s a great time to paint outside.” Although it is comfortable for the painter, it is not comfortable for the paint. A lot of exterior painting is done in the fall, and this is a bad mistake.
In my successful house painting business that I started in June 1970, I would not schedule any outside painting job after October 1. Some of my customers did not like this, and they hired another painter. I took quite a few years, but my customers soon found out that I was prudent in my decision not to paint outside after October 1.
Within a year or two, structures painted in the fall started to show signs of paint failure. There was cracking, peeling and flaking off of paint, and the paint job needed repair or repainting within a year or two. There is a scientific reason for this failure.
The scientific reason is in the drying and bonding of paint. Two things happen during this process. The vehicle (either latex or oil) dries up as the paint dries. The second thing that happens is that there is a chemical reaction within the paint. Both of these processes have to happen in a relatively warm environment. Paint cans will warn you not to apply paint when the temperature is below 50 or 55 degrees. Many fall days, it may be 70 in the daytime, but go down as low as 28 overnight. The fresh paint is still going through the chemical reaction necessary for proper adherence of the paint. This cannot occur in the lower temperatures, thus the paint does not adhere to the surface and peels off within a year or two.
There are some other reasons not to paint outside. Certain types of windows need putty (glazing compound.) Putty takes a very long time to dry, especially because a large amount of putty has to be used, making it thick. Putty also needs warmer temperatures to dry and cure properly, otherwise it will crack and have to be removed and replaced. For a good, tight paint job, you will also need to use a lot of latex caulk. Caulk also needs warmer temperatures to dry and cure. Primers need some warmth to dry.
By the way, fall is a perfect time for inside painting. Look for my upcoming article on this.
It really is simple when you understand the process. DON’T PAINT OUTSIDE IN THE FALL!
Do you need painters in the Durham Region? 
Emerald Professional Painters Toronto provides professional residential painting services. We are Toronto Painting Contractors that paint the interior and exterior of your house. Visit our website at https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/ or Call us at 647.909.3946 for a free quote today!
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/whitby-house-painters for Whitby interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/ajax-house-painters for Ajax interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/pickering-house-painters for Pickering interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/scarborough-house-painters for Scarborough interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors
https://www.emeraldpainting.ca/clarington-house-painters for Clarington interior exterior professional house painting services painting contractors

Choosing Paint Colours