One of the many outdoor home improvement projects I’ve completed this summer is a complete painting of a my home’s exterior. If you hire a professional house painting company you can easily spend between $2,000 to $5,000 for a general paint job, depending on the size of your home and the complexity involved. There are about a million variables in painting a home from the size of the home to the material you’re going to paint on to the condition of the surface to the climate and even type of paint. I’m just an amateur do-it-yourself kind of home improvement guy who wanted to save a few thousand dollars in labor.

Painting is one of those great first home improvement projects that just about anyone can do because in the end it’s hard to really hurt your home with paint. Sure, you can make things messier than they should be but generally you can’t do much damage to a house and a decent coat of fresh paint always makes you feel good for a while.

Besides, painting your home is a great way to protect the outside of it without relatively little cost. Yes, paint gives your home a pretty color and all but it’s also a protective layer that can help keep out bugs, keep out the weather and moisture and generally wrap your home in a protective layer that can extend the life of your home’s exterior for years. A lot of people say paint is “glue with color” but I like to think of it as “plastic wrap with color.” A good paintjob can basically seal your house up nice and tight. When I painted my home I considered myself to be taking something fragile (50 year old wood shingles) and wrapping them in an air tight protective plastic coating. It won’t last forever - I may have to paint again in five years or so - but it’s a good start.

Painting the outside of a home is a time consuming process which isn’t always a lot of fun, but there are some general ways you can make the entire paint job go much easier. I’m not a professional painter (it shows), but I learned a fair number of house painting tips and tricks and thought I’d pass along a few:

Prep Work Before Painting

I’ve learned that the actual act of applying paint doesn’t take that long. The prepwork that’s required before a good paint job does. I’ve learned that for every hour of actual painting you do there should be about two hours of prep work. It sounds like a lot, but by properly preparing the area for painting you’ll really end up saving more timeand do a better job in the end.

Painting Clothes: I learned this one long ago. Have a set of old work clothes that you really, really don’t mind getting paint on because, ultimately, you will get paint on them. Even the most careful painter in the world sometimes gets hit with a little splatter or a few drops. I have a set of clothes, including shoes that I only wear when I’m painting. I also have a separate set of glasses that I wear when painting because I once managed to bend over in such a way that my glasses slid right off my face and into a paint tray. I washed them off, but the paint got into some of the hinges and that pair of glasses was never the same again.

Painting Weather: I happened to get lucky with most of the days I was painting. You should aim to paint your house in days when it’s going to be warm (usually above 50 degrees) but not hot (anything over 90 might be tough) with low humidity and little chance of rain. Temperature, wind and even humidity can all affect how paint dries and it can make all your hard work useless if your paint doesn’t dry properly.

Wash Down Your House: Before you even touch a paintbrush you’re going to have to wash down your home pretty well to make sure there is no grime or loose dirt or flaking paint chips that can come off, undermining your paint job. Yes, you can use a power washer, but you need to be careful because using a power washer to clean your home can be dangerous and damaging to your home’s extior if you hit it with enough force. But a power washer probably isn’t going to be enough. You might also want to get a Nylon scrub brush and maybe some soapy water and simply scrub your house down. You’d be amazed at how much extra dirt comes off when you scrub it off as opposed just to using a power washer alone. I limited myself to painting no more than one side per day, so I only washed the side or the area I was going to paint for that day. There was no point in washing down my house one weekend because three weeks later the side I wanted to paint would probably be dirty again.

Scrap and Brush Away Old Paint: My home hadn’t been painted in at least 10 years and I had whole sections of paint chipping and peeling off, which was a pretty good sign that the previous homeowners may not have done a good job of washing the house down the last time they painted. I took a wire brush and a plastic paint scraper I just started moving across my home from one spot to another scraping off as many little paint chips and flakes as I could. This can get messy, so you might want to put down a dropcloth if you can. You’ll also want to be careful if the paint has lead in it. I like to use a plastic scraper instead of a metal one when possible because I’ve learned that a metal scraper can easily dig into wood boards and shingles if you’re not careful. This is a tedious job, but one which shouldn’t be skipped. Remember: you’re not trying to take off all the old paint, you’re just trying to take off all the old paint that’s going to chip or flake off soon. After you’ve done your scraping you might even want to take some sand paper over any areas of old paint that are still “slick” and smooth just to rough them up a little bit. Paint actually sticks better to a rough surface. I didn’t have this problem with my home. After you’re done scraping and brushing off a side you might want to hose it down again, just to get any remaining dust or paint flakes out of the way.

Painter’s tape can make all the difference between a neat and a messy paint job.

Using Painter’s Tape: I know painters who don’t use painter’s tape and rely on their own coordination to paint straight lines every time and never nick or over paint a window ledge or door frame or water faucet or any of the hundreds of other little things along a home’s exterior wall. Me, I’m a messy painter. I tape everything. I usually use painter’s tape that’s at least 1.5 inches wide and I go around windows, around doors, faucets, corners, stairs, railings, electrical boxes and anything at all where I don’t want paint to get. For windows and doors that I’m painting over I even tape newspaper over them to prevent any accidental drips. If you’ve ever dripped paint on window screen you’d understand. I still manage to drip and bump things now and then, but the tape helps. Taping is a time-consuming process but in end it’s less time consuming than repainting things and trying to scrape paint off things I didn’t want to paint.

Caulk and Seal While Prepping: I found myself spending a lot of time on a ladder taping around windows that I hadn’t really looked at very closely in years. During that time I found some gaps and places along a lot of my windows and doors that needed some replacement caulking. Where I could I tore off the old caulk (if there was any) and applied some new caulk. Again, painting helps seal out the weather and moisture from your home, and caulk is just one more way of sealing out the bad stuff. Most caulk should be allowed to dry a few hours before painting or getting it wet, so plan accordingly. I found that if I caulked from one side of the house to another as I taped that the caulk would generally be dried enough by the time I got around to actually painting.

Painting Your House

Finally, you’re ready to actually start putting up some paint. There are lots of things to consider, but if you’ve done your prep work this should actually go pretty easily.

Be Safe: Most homes painting jobs require at least some work on a ladder. Falling from ladders is the number one home improvement project accident, so be careful. I purchased a quality ladder stabilizer exclusively for painting my home and replacing my gutters and made both jobs much more enjoyable and safer.

To Prime or Not to Prime: Professional painters will tell you to use primer on your home. It will help the paint stick better, last longer and generally it’s a good idea. I don’t deny any of this. But I didn’t use primer on my house.

I’m not a professional. I’m a guy with a full-time job, a wife, a young kid and not much free time. I skipped the priming. Professional painters everywhere will scream at me and tell me I’ve essentially burned my house to the ground. Eh, we’ll see. I have rooms in my home where I primed and then painted and I have rooms in my home where I skipped priming. Sure, those are interior walls, but I quite frankly can’t see or feel much of a difference in the final result. I would definitely use primer on a new wall or new home, but since my home hasn’t been painted in at least 10 years (I still have a few sections that have NEVER been painted) I figure anything is better than nothing. Painting a house by yourself is a long, tedious job. I didn’t want do it twice in one summer. Instead I choose a better paint that was a little more protective but received good reviews from professionals and amateurs alike. Again, I wanted to extend the life of my exterior by another couple years and make it look good until I could move to vinyl siding.

Oh, and do not just buy a can of paint and a can of primer and mix them together. That will mess up your color (even if it’s white) and simply won’t work the way it’s intended to work.

Roller and Brush: Depending upon what you’re painting on you might want to switch back and forth between a roller and a paint brush. My house has three sides which are covered with a thin asbestos-fiber shingle board and one side that has real wood shingles of some sort. The asbestos-fiber shingles are thin and have almost no “bump” from one shingle to the next, so I was able to use a heavy roller for most of that work. I was able to do the same for my wood shingles, but since they have a “bump” of about 3/4 of an inch from one shingle row to the next I also had to take a paint brush and run along the top of each shingle row to get paint up there. I also used a brush for trim work and some tighter areas around water faucets and electrical boxes (which also had painter’s tape on them).

Paint From Top To Bottom: I usually try to start painting at the highest point of my project and slowly move down. This way if there are drips or little drops or anything falling down I usually catch them before they start to dry.

Use the Right Paint: For most of my house I used a well-known brand of exterior paint that got good reviews from consumer magazines and regular people. I had used it before and I liked it. But for the plastic shutters I didn’t use regular exterior paint - instead I purposely used an exterior paint that was formulated specifically for sticking to plastics. I also painted the metal Bilco basement doors with an exterior paint that was designed exclusively for painting metal surfaces. These paints are formulated to stick better to plastic and metal. If you don’t use the right paint for the right material you’ll only end up applying another coat of paint next year.

Painting Tools: You’ll probably need a variety of tools when painting your house from brushes to rollers to poles to drop cloths. Unlike painting an interior room, the outside of your house might have many different types of surfaces, odd angles and lots of hard-to-reach places. I used a heavy nappy roller for most of the painting on my house and it went so much faster than if I had used a brush. For trim work and detail work I used a high-quality brush and for some hard-to-reach places that I just needed to get covered but not be real neat about it I used some cheaper disposable brushes. I’ve learned that the quality of the paint brush or roller definitely matters and that, unfortunately, quality is often reflected in the price. I have a few exterior paintbrushes that I paid good money for, but as long as I care for them and clean them after each use they hold and spread paint better than any cheap brush ever could. I personally like using a Purdy paint brush like this one. It will last through many painting jobs as long as you clean it after each use and keep it dry when you’re storing it.

Conclusion

While it takes a while to paint your home yourself, it’s definitely a good way to save some money. I live in a Ranch style home with three taller peaks and most of the professional painting quotes I got for my home were between $3,000 to $4,000. After I finished painting my home I looked back at all the receipts and figure that I spent about $200 in paint and about another $100 in brushes, rollers, poles, paint trays and painter’s tape. It took me about four weekends to get 95% of the painting done and I was lucky because I had pretty good weather most of those days.

My wife helped a few days but for most of the time it was just me, the sunshine, my iPod and a lot of paint. My goal was to change the color of my house and protect the exterior of my house for another couple years until my wife and I could start saving up the money to cover our home with some sort of vinyl siding (we want this for the small insulation factor as well as for the generally lower maintenance required). I ultimately ended up saving myself a good $3,000 or more by doing the job myself.

Painting my house was an exhausting project that really turned my house into a home. It was a fun job to do, but it’s also one which I hope I won’t have to do again for at least a few years :-)