Living Rooms, Dining Rooms, Bedrooms

These rooms are where you will live and sleep; they need to be done right and with care. Living rooms and bedrooms have a lot of furniture in them that must be moved without scratching the hardwood floor or damaging the carpet or the furniture itself.

We need to mask off the carpet or hardwood floor around all the edges and then lay down tarps to cover the rest of the flooring and the furniture itself that has been moved to the middle of the room. Masking is always a huge part of interior painting and, if not done right, will come back to cause you troubles latter.

Prep work is the heart of any painting job you do, and even the easiest of jobs will still require prep work. Thus, these rooms need to be pole sanded, with the trim hand sanded. Then we need to deal with holes, cracks, bad tape lines and so on. What is most important in these filled areas, where flat paint or a low luster finish is going to be applied, is the right texture. Sheetrock mud applied over a hole and will sand out smooth. But most walls have some kind of texture on them. In thirty years of being a painter I have seen many different types of texture and trying to duplicate them is an art. You do not want to continually see this smooth spot in the middle of the wall where you fixed a hole; that is not being professional. Sanding, caulking, puttying holes, cleaning, masking, all have to be done right; any one step not completed correctly will show in up in the final look.

These are also the rooms that may have multiple colors, requiring yet another level of masking that needs to be applied perfectly.

Trim in these rooms can make or break the overall look of the room. We here at fine line painting think only oil base paint should be used on trim. I personally think latex is too often just a waste of time on trim. A lot of older homes here in Marin have their trim painted over a varnish or stain, and once you paint over varnish without the right amount of sanding or primer you are really in trouble. Also, most painters don’t try to repair the trim using painter’s putty which is more like a bondo and require more skill than simple caulk-like fillers; this material is very strong and made to be put on small dings or dents in your trim or doors,