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Host – Remy
Guest – Scott Leitch (Scotty)
What’s the difference between painting your home yourself, where you don’t have much experience versus using a professional?
there’s a few differences, paintings are trade, so a lot of people think they can just do it themselves because, you know, you watch the block and you watch all the other shows that say, you know, just get into it and do it yourself.
It’s not that easy. The biggest problem that people face doing it themselves is that they don’t get the right tools, they buy cheap stuff from bunning’s, which is no slag bunnies, but it does have cheap stuff.
So even a professional panel will struggle with some of the stuff that they have that, but things like the brushes are cheap, The rollers are cheap and you’re already in trouble before you start because it’s not good stuff.
So you need to go to a professional paint shop which is like Wattyl which is where I go and you need to spend the money like anything really. You need to spend the money on decent tools to do a decent job.
So do the tools make a difference in the end result, And how do you see that?
you can see paint. Patches, cheap rollers, you have lines coming down your walls and you can always tell when someone’s painted themselves because the cutting is not that good or they haven’t put enough coats on the wall. You can just tell. So you’ve just got to do it properly. You need to have the proper tools really. That’s the biggest mistake that everyone makes straight away of course
Doors and frames. So we go into some properties and all the walls are nice, white and sharp, right? But then the frames and the doors are still the old yellow, the previous colour. Why is that?
Well when you paint back in the day they use oil based paints and you use a white, the oil yellows and it used to really smell, they don’t do that anymore, you’ll use acrylic paint now. So that stays white but a lot of people might just paint the walls and not the doors and frames. But when the house is aged, if you start painting, like you paint the walls and then you leave the doors and frames and then the doors and frames look well and it’s like where do you stop?
So you really have to paint the whole house, Even though it’s much harder to paint them. there’s a lot of work into the frame because they need to be under coated, sanded down.
You Need to take all the hardware off to do a proper job, take the door handles off and you don’t want to see paint on your door handles. You don’t want to see paint on your door hinges. So it’s a much far more intricate job than just patching a wall.
Say you’ve got a door that’s got you know like patterns in it. You’ve got to brush all those in. It’s just a lot more work in that. It makes a massive difference. They look like brand new doors, put your door handles back on even if you change your door handles, it all just looks brand new. It’s where most of the work is, but it makes the biggest difference.
Why did we move from oil to acrylic paint?
the difference one’s oil based. So you have to wash up with Terps and it takes like five hours to dry. It’s really sticky and it really smells your house out. So People don’t use oil based paints much these days. Acrylic paint smells better and comes up with the same finish as oil-based paints.
Let’s say they just bought a property and there’s a purple wall a blue wall and they just want a whole house white. Is it a lot more work for you or for anyone to go paint that back to white because it’s a different quite heavy colour?
So the colours make a big difference because if you’ve got a dark colour you want to go to white? It’s going to take four coats to cover it. As opposed to I suppose if you’re just re painting it purple it might only take one coat if it’s not too damaged.
But when you’re changing colours like that to white, it needs three coats probably. With the doors and frames, If they’re too yellow, The white will even need three coats. White is just not a good covering colour.
Patching up and all that kind of plaster work, that can come before painting right? We’ve seen some people that just replace the lights and stuff and then there’s holes in every wall. Is that hard for someone to obviously fill those holes. And do all the work needed to make the ceiling look perfect again what comes what are the steps to do that?
Well that’s the hardest part of the painting procedure because it’s like when you paint anything you’ve got to have the proper preparation for it to look nice and if there’s a ding in the wall it’s you’re going to still see that thing. You’re only painting what’s there, you can’t hide things with the paint.
If you’ve got a hole and it’s really hard to patch you don’t know what you’re doing to patch it properly, if you use your spak filler from bunning’s it’s not going look good because it’s like concrete, you can’t sand it, there’s a real art to patching stuff.
To make it look like it’s brand new, it’s seamless and sometimes you get the houses that have been that way for many years and you can’t fix everything, you can’t make it look brand new because it’s not brand new. It’s chipped, it’s dinged and you can get it looking good, but not perfect.
can you paint anything? You know, we’ve had a few cases where people wanted to paint the kitchen. Is it a straightforward and so yes or no or does it depend on the type of kitchen?
No, you shouldn’t really paint your laminates. The paint doesn’t like to stick, they make a paint for it, but it’s not really, it’s not hard, it doesn’t stick well enough. So no, you shouldn’t paint your kitchen. It’s a cheap way out to try and get your kitchen to look nice. A very cheap way out because you’re looking at $10000 for a new kitchen where someone to paint it might cost you $4000, but I don’t recommend it.
Same with tiles, they’ve got tile paint but you can tell you’ve painted it.
What about brick? Like external brick?
You can paint brick. No worries, That’s fine. roofs like on top of roofs, roofs are fine, tiled roofs, tin roofs that are pretty good.
What mistakes can people make when painting?
One of the, one of the biggest mistakes people make painting doing the painting themselves is they think, okay, we can paint this house, let’s do it ourselves. We paint these two bedrooms to start with.
If it’s going to take me a professional painter, say two days, three days to paint a couple of rooms like ceiling walls. If you’re doing that on the weekend and you’re a professional painter, it’s going take you probably two months every weekend to paint it.
By then You’re pulling your hair out. You’ve already you’ve already wrecked your roller because you haven’t watched something because your relationship is in the struggle. You’ve got paint everywhere; you need to replace your carpets and so sometimes it’s better just to sit on the couch and let the professionals do the work.
Is it easier to paint when a house is unfurnished? Is it more work if there’s furniture? What do you need to do, remove it?
No, you don’t want you don’t want furniture in the in the house. And it’s hard when people live there too because every day you got to pack up and yeah, it’s better that if it’s like a site that’s just for painting.
What about drop sheets and stuff? You just got to set up and everything like that?
It’s just you don’t want to get paint on the floor, you put drop sheets down, plastic up your furniture. If you’re rolling your ceilings and stuff like the last thing you wanna do is be scratching paint off the floors.
Painting wet areas, like bathrooms, toilets. Is that any different than like your normal bedroom and hallway or not really?
Yeah, there’s not much ventilation in there, you probably put a semi-gloss, which is a different type of paint. So you can wipe it if there’s mold. But if it’s good ventilation in there it doesn’t it doesn’t really matter.
Outdoor decks right, painting them you know a lot of timber when it’s outside it with the sun. It gets pretty old and pretty shitty. How do you make them look amazing again?
You know decks are really common and it really a lot of people just let them go too far in Queensland. The sun is quite intense so you really need to be oiling your deck every six months. You can use like oil or you can use your ultra-deck which is your water based stuff.
If the deck has gone too far, you need to pressure clean it all the way back and then coat it up. We’re doing that every six months. Otherwise it’ll just destroy the timber.
You use specific paint made for decks, and if you look after it well, protecting it from the elements, it will look stunning. There is a lot of work that goes into maintaining a deck.
Thanks to Scotty for joining us today! Stay tuned for more episodes of the Home Enthusiast Podcast with Remy
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