The Difference a Coat of Paint Can Make

What are the really important things you want to do with your home and garden? When we look at our annual household budget we tend to think of the large projects like that new gazebo, or extended driveway. How easy to forget that the look and feel of your home, the overall attractiveness and hominess will be a product of the colour as well as the sanitation of the home environment.

The difference a coat of paint can make! We often dwell in our homes and wake up every day to the long delayed plan to paint this year, even later this month, how about next two weeks? OK, next year?

And the elements continue to eat away at the colours of the front veranda, the garage columns, and the fence.

Preventing a house from looking like a pig-sty is surprisingly tedious, expensive, and time-consuming. And it does not matter whether you hire help or do it yourself.

Perhaps the best way motivation is to take a look at properties that are unkempt. No matter which city you live I you can find them, run down inner city apartments; badly maintained government buildings; genteel homes whose owners are out of pocket or out of mind; and that public disgrace, heritage sites that are allowed to run down.

Look at the scruffy woodwork, the layers of dirt, the peeling paint, the leaking plumbing; and go back home and tell yourself that if you keep procrastinating, your property will be no different in, say, three years. Scary stuff.

So where do we get started?

Sometimes we don’t have to do anything much.  Just go out and buy fifteen gallons of paint, some brushes and rollers; and get started one room at a time.  In two weeks your property will become transformed.

Remember that surface preparation is essential, all that scraping and washing to remove old paint and any deposit.  Using drop cloth or some good old newspaper will contain spills. 

Clean up afterwards.  And if you soak rollers and brushes in water this will help to keep them reusable and easier to clean.

I don’t like to have oil paint or thinner around the house because thinner is so flammable.  So try to minimise the use of oil paint.  Nowadays I believe that people apply oil paint only to metal, or wood which is exposed to water.   

And if you can’t afford to paint the entire house, don’t worry, just get some exterior wall paint and put some fresh colours on the outside walls.