Prepping and Priming for Exterior House Paint

Believe it or not, but we’ve gotten a lot done on the house since my last post about it. Hubby is helping to paint the outside of a neighbor’s house to teach a bunch of teenage boys how to paint. The neighbors get a newly-painted house, and the boys learn an important life skill that will help them down the road.

Win-win, in my book.

With all of the scraping finished, it was time to protect the house from primer and paint. We picked a beautiful overcast Saturday to work on this phase of the project.

In just a few short hours, hopefully their neighbors will be able to stop worrying that this family has lost all desire to maintain their home! I admit…after getting rid of some flaking paint, the house wasn’t exactly looking stellar.

Today will be an instant upgrade, however, with some priming taking place. Actually, we painted the walls today, too, but I will save that for another post. It is incredibly satisfying to see these walls go from blue to white primer to a gorgeous warm gray.

We taped some newspapers down to protect the brick, which isn’t getting painted during this particular house painting excursion. And we protected the cement below with more newspapers, because we don’t want our work to look messy!

The lower walls are going to transform today…from blue to beautiful! A week from now, we will return to spray all of the trim a darker color than the walls.

Hubby got to work rolling the primer onto the walls. Primer will help make a better bond for the top coats of paint. Since this is all exterior in the extreme desert, we wanted to provide every opportunity for this paint job to last. So primer was a must.

Charles came behind Hubby with a paintbrush to fill all the gaps between raised board layers on the walls. I’m already loving the color change!

We worked for about an hour this morning without any boys arriving. They were helping at the Turkey Trot and had to finish cleaning up while we adults headed to the house to begin prepping. About an hour into our work, the boys arrived to help.

  

But we got a lot done before they showed up. It’s amazing how much work can be accomplished by several helping hands!

The primer was soon down and only needed an hour to dry before the house could have its first coat of paint. We still needed to finish protecting the house from overspray from the paint gun, so we weren’t quite ready for paint just yet. All of that brick needed to be covered with plastic wrap or newspaper. Same thing with all of the windows and doors!

But it’s already looking awesome, huh? At this point, I was reminded of how much I love seeing the end result. I think that’s why my model airplanes never really worked out as a kid. I would get so excited to paint that I wouldn’t let the glue dry properly from assembly.

Hmmmm. Maybe I’ve always been impatient! Who knew?

This is awesome Tom. He was scraping this side of the house before some primer went on. Flaky paint means that the new paint won’t be able to adhere, so we had to make sure that all surfaces were ready to go.

Thankfully, because of the paint being sprayed on, this prep work was the hardest part. Once the paint started going on with a sprayer, it was a very quick process. So quick, in fact, that we did both coats of paint on the walls before we left today around 5:30 PM!

As you can see, this window needs more attention than just some primer. After the primer layer went down, we filled all of those holes with caulk. It looks brand-new, now, and is gorgeous!

We also primed all of the door and window trim, though they will need to be painted with the darker color after the walls have been sprayed with the light.

This side of the house, which got scrubbed to perfection by several people last time that we were here, got a coat of primer as well. It’s amazing to me how just a little paint primer can already make something look so much better!

  

Everyone pitched in to help. And when the boys arrived, they got to work covering the brick so that the spraying of the walls could commence.

Every window got protected as well. Ann and I worked hard on that while the men folk covered the house with plastic.

We even came back to protect these windows entirely with newspapers. With such a powerful spray gun doing all of the painting work, we had to make sure that all areas that we didn’t want painted were well-covered.

I will come back to paint these ironwork pillars after all of the house is finished. They are also letting me paint the door a beautiful deep red, so I’m really excited for that! Maybe next week when I am home for a few days from work…

Lots of help arrived this morning. Throughout the day, we probably had about fifteen people helping. We even had a neighbor friend drive by to see what was going on…and then she returned with a casserole for dinner for all of us to enjoy after working so hard!

I love living in this area. Have I mentioned how wonderful these people are?

We even have this side of the house scraped and primed. Someone will be along shortly to prime this bare wood above. This trim was rotting away, so another friend in the neighborhood donated his time and skill to replace it!

And it looks gorgeous. It’s amazing how much can be accomplished when everyone gives a little. We really appreciated the help from all of these experts, too.

It’s just a double-bonus that he lays wooden trim for a living!

The entire back of the house was primed and ready for paint as well. Ann and I continued our window covering skills back here until everything was prepped and ready for paint. Then the boys moved these boxes to the yard so they wouldn’t get covered in paint when the patio was sprayed.

And then, because the spray gun has so much force, we carefully swept away all paint chips and debris so that it wouldn’t fly back up onto the walls during painting. With this last step complete, I think that we’re ready for the fun part.

Let’s paint this thing!