Painting a room can be a tedious project that is physically demanding, so it can be tempting to take short cuts and settle into bad habits. It's important to enforce good habits while painting, but for inexperienced painters it can be impossible to know what could be going wrong. We will go over a few beginner tips for rolling paint to ensure your next project goes smoothly!

Set up proper floor protection

Drop cloths, or any sort of floor protection, are essential when painting. Even the best painters make mistakes, and it only takes one mistake to ruin a carpet. Always make sure you use floor protection while painting, even for the smallest jobs. Whenever you place any tool or container down, make sure it's on a drop cloth! Ideally you would want enough floor protection to cover the entire work area, but two long sections of drop cloths can have you set. Simply set up the two drop cloths side by side and work in one direction, once you've moved on to the next drop cloth, move the previous one ahead of the other. Effectively you'll have a long chain of floor protection without ever having to risk setting your supplies on an area that isn't protected. Drop cloths also make for a great cleanup station at the end of the day! You can pick up drop cloths at most home hardware and paint stores. Trendz always keep a large stock of drop cloths for our painters that are mandatory on every job site.

Always keep your brush and roller wet

It seems fairly self explanatory that you would want paint in the brush or roller, but many inexperienced painters really push the limits of how much paint they can squeeze out of a tool after a single dip. It might seem efficient, but what this does is result in poor paint coverage that will be very visible after it has dried. You should paint until you can see that the colour is starting to fade or streak, the goal is to completely cover the previous coat with the new one. When dipping your roller sleeve in the paint, have it soak up enough to be almost dripping. Wipe off any excess paint in the roller tray to keep it under control. A full sleeve of paint should cover roughly three feet of a standard wall before a refill is required. 

Keep a wet edge

What this essentially means is to finish the section you're painting quickly and without stopping. To get a nice even coat you have to keep advancing the paint edge so that you're not continuously painting over paint that is trying to dry. Some paint products dry very quickly and are particularly unforgiving so make sure you keep rolling forward!

Roll as much as you can

The closer you can get your roller to the ceilings, baseboards, or other walls, the less brushwork you will have to do in order to fill the gap in between. This is one of the reasons why cutting a wall with a brush before rolling is so helpful, because you can see exactly how close your roller can get before hitting the adjacent wall or ceiling. If you're not comfortable with rolling too close to the edge, then you can use particularly wide brush strokes while cutting to give yourself more breathing room.

Remember: although it's tempting to take shortcuts or rush a job, you would only set yourself up for a lacklustre paint finish and possibly a bigger headache down the road. Keep these good habits enforced, and you'll be painting like a Trendz Pro!

If you need help with any painting projects, contact Trendz Painting for a free, fast, and easy estimate! We are the pros.