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Painters

How To Paint In Summer

painting in summer

When it’s hot and windy, paint starts to lose water to evaporation as soon as you pour it into the applicator’s bucket. It’s OK to reconstitute the paint with as much as 10 percent water (and if you’re spraying, you may need to). But thin in batches—don’t thin the same bucket all day or you’ll end up with more water than paint. After each break or after lunch is a good time to thin another batch.

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Direct sunlight heats up the substrate and causes paint to dry quickly—maybe too quickly. Work on the south side early in the morning, get the west side done before the sun reaches it, and work on the east side in late afternoon when it’s had a chance to cool off, or early in the morning.

Place some ice cubes in the painter’s bucket before inserting the liner and filling with paint. The ice-water jacket around the liner will keep the paint can cool while it’s hanging off the ladder in the sun, extending the paint’s working life in the can and allowing crucial extra minutes for the coating to dry at its ideal rate.

Hot, windy weather is paint’s enemy. Heat and low humidity accelerate evaporation—and when paint dries too fast, the binders and pigments can’t coalesce and interlock as well, and the protective paint film may not be as durable or flexible. Ideal application temperatures range from 50 F to 80-plus F, but when temps climb to 90 F and above, paint suffers.

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Categories
Painters

How to Hire a Painting Contractor For Your Project

painting contractors

Certain home improvement projects require a professional. Not many homeowners are ready to install their HVAC, pour a foundation, or build an addition. Other projects though, like painting, just seem to be begging for the do-it-yourselfer. After all, who isn’t capable of dabbing a brush into paint?

But painting is more difficult than it looks. So, it is with great pleasure that many DIY painters decide that it is now time to hire a painting contractor to take on the job. Let us find out what painting contractors do, how to hire them, and how to negotiate the best price for your painting job.

What Is a Painting Contractor?
A painting contractor can work as a sub, or sub-contractor, under a general contractor, or can hire itself out directly to the homeowner. Usually, the painting contractor is a relatively small operation, ranging from the one-man sole proprietor up to 20 or 30 painters working for a small company.

How to Find One
Painting contractors tend to be local (as of yet, there are no nationally franchised paint contractors). While paint contractors concentrate on painting, some perform associated tasks such as plaster repairs, minor drywall work, trim and molding, and wallpapering.

The other difficult part is getting a painting contractor to show up. While this generalization does not apply to every painter, you can rarely get a paint contractor to show up to look at the house and to later produce a written estimate. It’s hardly the fault of the painting contractors; it is a combination of the contractors being smaller operations along with a high demand for their work.

Because it is next to impossible to find out information about local painting contractors on the Internet, the adage “talk to neighbors” applies here. Some painting contractors display signs on the lawns of houses they are working on, but you find this more with general contractors and siding and replacement windows companies. So, other than the painter’s white panel van out front, you often do not know what is going on inside your neighbors’ houses.

Urban areas often have local magazines (e.g., in Seattle, there is Seattle Magazine), and many of them feature renovated homes. These pieces will list the names and phone numbers for the contractor and sub-contractors—but be warned, these sub-contractors are usually very high-end and expensive.

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