5 Tips on Repainting Your Home’s Interior

When it is time to repaint the interior of your home, you can do it yourself with these few simple tips rather than hiring someone. Whether it is time to cover scuff marks, you want to change your color scheme, or you need to paint your walls a neutral shade to help your house sell, these tips for repainting your home will help you get your house looking like it was painted by a professional painter.

1. When repainting your home’s interior, opt for low-VOC or no-VOC paint.

The healthiest solutions for repainting your home is paint that has few or no volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in it. This is critical in a home where one of the inhabitants has asthma, is sensitive to chemicals, or has a breathing disorder. If there are young children in the house, you especially want to stick to low-VOC or paint with no VOCs in it as their detoxification systems for offloading the VOCs is not fully formed and they could be harmed by breathing the VOC fumes.

Benjamin Moore’s has a Natura® paint with zero VOCs, and many of the other paint manufacturers offer a line of low-VOC or no-VOC paint.

2. Preparing the walls before painting is a very important step.

While this prepping step is time-consuming and people often skip it, the painting is much easier, faster, and looks better when you first prep the walls by:

• Scraping or sanding the imperfections from the walls, spackling holes, and sanding to smooth the spackle
• Cleaning the dust and other stuff off the walls first makes the paint adhere better. Use a vacuum for all but kitchen and bath walls and scrub those.
• Use painter’s tape wherever paint should not end up, such as wood trim. Cover or temporarily remove door knobs.
• Apply primer over a dark color and let it dry before painting.

3. Paint the walls, not the furniture

No matter how hard we try, the reality is that when we are working with a paint roller, little speckles of paint fly off in all directions. The best way to prevent those speckles from getting all over everything is to move the furniture out entirely, but that often is not practical. So, go to Family Dollar Store and get lots of inexpensive plastic drop cloths and cover everything including the floor.

Also be sure to take draperies, shades, towel racks in the bathroom and kitchen down. Remove wall hangings like mirrors, take up area rugs, and take off switch plates and receptacle covers.

4. Get all of the materials for repainting your home together

• Paint can opener
• Stirrers for the paint
• Paint tray and rollers
• Extension pole for the paint rollers (for the ceilings)
• Paint brushes
• Gloves

5. You are now ready to begin painting

• Use an angled brush to paint into the corners near the ceiling.
• Use a small brush where the large brush will not fit.
• When you begin painting with the rollers, paint walls with a roller in the shape of a large letter W that measures 3 feet by 3 feet. Then fill in the blank spaces of the ‘W’ as you are painting.

Repainting your home’s interior will go smoothly with these simple tips.