Paint a House

A home is the biggest investment you will ever make. It only makes sense to keep the biggest investment of your life in the best shape possible. The appearance of the home is a major factor in keeping its value. Painting the exterior of the house is not as hard as it appears; in fact it's quite simple.

In order to paint the house efficiently you will need a crew kit and a few different sized ladders. A crew kit is a large plastic bin with all of the tools needed for the job and more. Brushes and rollers are the two most known. Other tools include: scrapers, caulk guns, 5-in-1 tools, rags, drop clothes, pot hooks, buckets, self-priming paint, screens, hammers, steel wire brushes, extension poles, wood putty, putty knives, spinners, goo gone bottles, ladder mittens, and a first aid kit. They are all very important to getting the job done right.

Once you are familiar with the tools it's time to prepare the house to be painted. Scraping the old chipped portions of paint is the first thing to do. Once you're done with the scraping, caulking is the second step in preparing the house. Most of the caulking will be over old caulk that has split apart over the years. Any other gaps you see can be caulked but are usually not necessary. Now the house is ready to paint.

The best place to start is with the soffits. To reach the soffits you need to place a long ladder against the gutter and place it at a height to distance of the feet from the gutter ratio of 4:1 feet. This way the angle will not be too steep, which would cause the ladder to fall backwards, nor not steep enough, which would cause the feet to slip back and the top to come crashing straight down. Now that the ladder is set, you climb up it with your bucket in hand. Inside the bucket you will need paint, a brush, a roller, and a screen. Once the pot hook that's attached to the bucket is hanging on the ladder, you use your brush to paint the board the gutters are touching. Then use your brush to paint the line dividing the siding from the soffit. Now use the roller to quickly finish the underside of the soffit. With a few ladder movements one side of a house will be done.

Siding is the next portion to paint. The siding is the biggest area to paint but the easiest. First set the ladder against the siding towards the top at the same angle as before. With the same bucket set up with different