I was busy renovating my home and make it more presentable. Because I had done it in such a long time. Everyone keep asking, why I haven’t finished it. So I am thinking of sharing some of the lessons learned so that it might help others before they start painting their home.

Lesson 1. Time and effort

You might want to consider whether you had the time to do the painting. Depends on what you are planning to paint it can be time consuming. We all have the same 24 hours in a day.

If you plan to paint one room in your home with the size of approximate 3×4 meter. You might need to allocate minimum of 2 full days of 8 hours. This will include preparing the wall and ceiling ready (clean using sugar soap). Pick the right colour for the paint (you will spend at least 1 hr at Bunnings, trust me). Then masking the necessary area that you don’t want to paint. And finally the painting itself will need two coats if you want to change the colour. You will need to wait for 2-4 hours between coat depending on the weather. Then the final finished to remove all the masking tape when the paint dry.

The above time doesn’t include the time to fix or patching up some holes on the wall that was caused by picture nails or existing unused halogen lights holes. You will need to add additional day for the patching work.

The above timing also doesn’t consider painting of the door, door frame and the window and the window frame. You will most likely need to add another one or two days for these.

Lesson 2. Tools required

It might sounds strange to think we need to consider the tools for painting. It would just be the paint brush and paint surely right? Yes, probably if you are only thinking about the painting bit. Here are the list of tools that I had used:

– Paint brush

– paint rollers (I used up a couple of this), you will need variety of sized, big or bigger area and a small one for small area like door frames and window.

– buckets and towel to clean the walls, ceiling and other surfaces that you want to paint.

– ladders to help with painting higher to reach spot

– paint tray to hold the paint

3. The materials used

Isn’t the materials just paint? True but once you get into the paint section in Bunnings you will be inundated with the variety of paint and all the different colour to choose from.

Here are the materials used depends on what you are trying to paint it might differ:

Ceiling & Cornice

What is Cornice? It is the bits that stuck between the ceiling and the wall. You might or might not have a Cornice, if you don’t have one that means you can see the corner between the wall and the ceiling.

Use flat ceiling paint for the ceiling (if you are only painting one room, you can get the 2l ceiling paint that change colour when it dried to help making sure you don’t missed a spot, for larger area it gets very expensive as it doesn’t come in larger quantity.

Wall

Use the low sheen paint, this comes in variety of can. For one room (3m x 4m) you will need about 4L of paint. For details calculation please read my other post on how to calculate how much paint needed.

Door, Window and frame

Use the aquanamel paint. This comes in gloss or semi gloss. Just a different finish look. The gloss is shinier than the semi gloss. Aquanamel paint you can clean with water, it cost a bit more than the enamel paint which required turp for cleaning.

4. Surface preparation

Can’t I just paint? Do I need to prepare the surface? Off course, like anything preparation is the key. You can always just paint it without any preparation, but the finish might not be as good and it won’t last as long.

You will start with clearing all things that attached to the surface area you would like to paint, things like nails, hanger, hooks, door knob, screws etc. Then clean the surface using Sugar soap. You can get them in Bunnings too. Make sure you clean all the surface area, Yes including the ceiling and this is when you stairs come handy.

You will be amazed how good the sugar soap is, it removed almost everything, old stain and grease will be all gone. This is also the most boring exercise compared to the rest.

Now once you clean the surface, you might find that you had some paint that was chipping away, and small dent or holes here and there. The chip paint needs to be cleared as much as you can. And holes needs to be patched if you don’t want it showing up after you did the hard work of painting.

For permanent things like power point and fixture you can’t remove, you can mask around them. Power point face plate can be removed.

5. Where to start

Now that you had prepared all the surface and patched up all the holes, it is time to start the painting. But wait you will need to mask the adjoining area you don’t want to be painted.

If you plan to paint the whole room, you don’t have to mask anything when you start with the ceiling and Cornice. Iy is recommended to have two coats of paint.

Once the ceilings and Cornice is done, you can start with the walls. Now you need to make sure the Cornice is masked so that you don’t paint it over with the wall paint, even they are the same colour they are not the same paint.

Then the last would be the door, windows, door frame, Window frame and the floor Cornice if you had one. You definitely need to mask the adjoining surface like the wall, floor or carpet to ensure you didn’t accidentally paint over them. It is quite handy to have a wet cloth nearby to make sure you can clean up the accidental paint that gets into the unwanted area.

Congratulations on reading this so far, now that you are well equipped with the information that you need to do your own painting. If you still up for the challenge please continue, and I wish you all the best, or if this is too much work, you can always get the professional painter to do it for you.