7 Tips For Painting Your Living Room in Arlington, VA
When you’re thinking of updating the look of your living room, one thing that you may want to do in addition to rearranging things or getting new furniture is to paint the walls.
The process of painting your living room can be somewhat difficult but if you come prepared and have some ideas as to what you are doing beforehand, it can make everything that much better.
With that in mind, let’s look at and consider seven tips for painting your living room in Arlington, VA.
1. Protect Before You Start
One of the most important things in painting your living room actually starts well before you even lift the paintbrush for the first time.
What this essentially entails is making sure that anywhere you are painting you do your best to make sure that the paint only gets on the surfaces being painted — or at worst protective materials you use to cover parts of your living room that shouldn’t get painted.
The floor is one of the first things that people think of in terms of protecting the living room while painting, and you will want to use something like a drop cloth to make sure that paint doesn’t get on the floor.
Far easier to clean such a drop cloth or reuse it for future painting projects than to try to clean the paint off of the floor.
2. Remove The Light Switch Covers And Electrical Outlet Covers
Another thing to do to protect the living room is to remove both the light switch covers as well as the covers for the electrical outlets.
These too are also easier to protect once you have removed them — and if you are concerned about the spaces that will be left once you remove the covers, you can use painter’s tape.
3. Don’t Let Paint Dry Before Removing Painter’s Tape
You might well use painter’s tape to protect certain other surfaces from the paint — the edges where the wall meets the ceiling, for example — but you will have to remove the tape at some point.
Specifically, you will need to remove the tape before the paint has dried because otherwise you will possibly remove some of the paint from the surface you have just painted.
4. Use The Right Kind Of Paint
Of course, you should well know that since you are painting your living room, you’re not going to be using exterior paint — you’re using interior paint.
Some people might not realize that there are different finishes for paint ranging from flat to glossy, and the difference that these different finishes will present.
Specifically, if the room is expected to be high traffic (and possibly full of peanut butter and jelly finger bearing individuals) it may be worth using glossy paint to make it that much easier to clean.
5. Get Small Paint Samples To Check Colors
There are a number of ways to see what colors are right for your living room, but certainly, the best way involves getting actual small paint samples and testing it out.
You won’t be painting a large area but just enough so that once it dries you will be able to see what the color will look like during the day, at night, with the lights on and off, etc.
6. Clean First
Cleaning is an important step in preparing to paint your living room.
You’re going to want to clean not only the surface that is going to be painted but also the area near where you are painting so that you don’t inadvertently get any dust on the wall while you are painting.
7. Remember Primer
Lastly, it’s important that you remember that before you apply a coat of paint, you should first apply a coat of primer and then allow it to dry.
This is because while the paint is great at adhering to surfaces, they adhere to primer best of all — and you want to have your paint stay on the surface being painted as long as possible.
A living room painted with primer will last considerably longer than one that is painted without any primer.
Image Painting is a professional full-service residential & commercial painting contractor based in Falls Church, Virginia. We have served the Washington DC metropolitan area since 2003. You can click below to request an estimate.
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