3 Steps To Save Money By Painting Your Home Yourself

We can get a lot of people to do our work for us, whether that’s getting Amazon to deliver our shopping to us, delegate snow shoveling to our kids or young neighbourhood entrepreneurs, or getting someone to paint our homes. With painting especially, we can often do the job ourselves with acceptable results. After all, a passable paint job takes more time than skill. Here are three ways you can save some money by doing your next painting project yourself.

Get the Right Tools

Painting is more than just a bucket of paint and a paint brush. You need to be fully equipped with extra paint brushes, rollers, painting tape, and plastic sheets to keep your house clean. There’s no such thing as a quick paint job, just a job done right with minimal clean up. Getting the right tools makes sure that most of your time will be dedicated to painting, not cleaning up mistakes made along the way.

Use Quality Paint

Quality paint is the best way to get the right look sooner. Many stores will try and sell you bargain basement paint, claiming you can save money through cheaper paint. But cheaper paint requires more coats and more work. If you combine the increased amount of paint and the extra time you spend applying it, a quality paint is actually cheaper overall. But high quality paint is just the first step. Always get the right paint for the job as well. Exterior paint jobs, for example, will look awful and fall apart faster if a person is painting using interior paint. By getting the right paint for the job, you’ll save time and money.

Properly Prepare the Area for Painting

Most problems with people’s paint jobs happen before they’ve even started putting paint on the walls. Alligatoring, peeling, and many other problems are mostly caused by one major factor: a lack of proper preparation. Always prep your walls for a new paint job by sanding it down, replacing or removing damaged parts of the wall, and applying a quality primer as the first couple of coats. A properly prepared wall will look better, last longer, and be less likely to fall prey to many of the problems that come from doing a poor job at the very beginning.

There are many instances when painting projects yourself is the best choice; you can save money and enjoy the work itself by dedicating some time to the job. But there are instances when getting a professional painter is almost entirely necessary. More technical jobs or painting in dangerous areas (like at heights) are best handled by a professional painting contractor. But for your average painting job, you can save some time and money by following the suggestions above. With the right tools, paint, and preparation, you’ll be done before you know it and may even have some left over money. If that’s the case, go out there and treat yourself for a job well done.