When painting a room, what do you think is the most critical part of the process?

Oh, it’s a toss up of covering furniture and moving them to the center of the room to taping around windows, doorways and anything you can’t remove. It makes a difference in how quickly you can paint.
Oh, and make sure you always have a damp rag to pick up any paint that touched a surface you didn’t want painted.

Crisp, accurate taping. Makes all the difference in the final results.

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Good priming is important if you’re painting over deep colours.

Good masking and trimming make the difference between a sloppy-looking job and a clean, professional looking one. If you take your time and do this part right, and the rest is a no-brainer.

Make sure you prep the walls before priming or painting. Fill in holes, sand, and wash (if necessary – especially if a smoker lives in the house).

Proper masking! Clean areas to be taped so tape adheres well. Make masked edges exact so the line between unpainted area and painted areas are precise. Like washing your car, paying attention to detail pays off after the job is done.

I agree with everything y’all said. I’ll spend 90% of the time cleaning and trimming than actual rolling, which is, actually, kind of anti climatic. You spend half your life on your knees, crawling around, or up on a ladder reaching and twisting, mudding and sanding, till you ache and hurt. Then it comes time to roll and it’s like BOOM! DONE!

However I don’t tape or mask any more. I used to, then one day, a few years ago, Rick and I went to drop a piece of equipment off at a house. The guy invited us in. There was a lady painting the around the trim on a door. No tape. I said, “Don’t you tape?”
She said she did not. Then she showed me her technique. With a small edging brush she just pushed a small bead of paint right up to the edge. It was amazing! Utter perfection. I was not sure of my ability, or patience, to do what she did, and, in fact, I just didn’t have the patience to sustain it as well as she did, but I just cleaned as I went. Still beat taping.

We have two rooms to paint. For some reason I remembered a set of kid’s craft paint brushes that I’d picked up at Walmart over Easter. It popped into my brain to try using one of those brushes for edging. I thought I was crazy. But I tried it….after I got my groove on, I could NOT believe how WELL it works! It’s just like drawing a line with a pencil, it’s that accurate. Plus it’s so small that when you get to a place where the trim is not flush with the wall, the brush slips in right behind it. And no masking. It doesn’t take any more time than usual, because you’re going the same distance. Your line is just thinner. But when you’re ready to attack it with an actual trim brush, it’s much easier to hit that thin line than the edge.

I use the green one. For whatever reason, with these brushes you don’t have stray bristles sticking out, tapping paint on your trim, either.

(Of course I still cover all the furniture and rugs that can’t be removed. I’m sitting in a forest of plastic as we speak, getting ready to put the final touches on the trim in the this room. Rick already rolled it. Cat’s having a hay day!)

Well, gotta go. My paint awaits. >_<. I’m so sick of painting!!

The edging. I almost never tape anything. I use the thingy with the wheels/rollers.

I have a question. When you do use tape, do you take the tape off as soon as you paint? Or, you wait for the paint to dry?

For me, it’s resisting the urge to throw a paint-filled roller across the room while screaming “F**k it, I don’t need this shift!!!” when I mess up around the trim.

Hire professionals & stay clear of pink in the butler’s quarters, he wept openly last time & I realised my teasing went too far…not!!

I’ve done it as you said, with and without the tape. My eyesight isn’t as it use to be, so I personally prefer the tape now. For a small area no, but for a whole room, I rather get the taping out of the way so there is a chance of less clean up afterwards. I can’t say that not taping is any faster though because you have to go at a snails pace and I hate having to keep my arm steady over my head for a long time.

@Leslie, either or. It really depends on how quickly the paint dries. Some paints are almost dry in 2 hours. I wait till it’s dry. After looking at wet paint for a while, it isn’t till the paint dries that you will know if there are some areas you have to go over and sometimes that will be near taped areas. So wait till it dries and look it over from top to bottom in daylight. It’s harder to notice in the evening with just lamps. They may reflect the paint and make it difficult for you to tell where the paint was a little thin, especially if you use semi gloss.

@Pandora I one time waited for the paint to dry and when I pulled the tape the paint came up with the tape. This was a long time ago. Maybe it was semi-gloss or gloss I’m thinking? That type of paint might hold together like that. That’s when my husband bought the roller thingy for the edges, and we’ve always used it since.

@Pandora I have to put on my reading glasses to do it up close. I’m alternating between reading glasses, no glasses, then, after a certain distance, put glasses on. My eyes are exhausted. Not to mention my butt and shoulders.

You still do want to tape / mask before you roll, but if you wait till your trim is dry, after you’ve gone after the thin line with a wider, official trim brush, you have a nice, wide, flat area to affix the tape to, and you only have to lightly press it down so you don’t have to pull so hard to get it off. You don’t have to be so very meticulous about getting the tape just so on the trim, either. You can use strips of cloth or something to hang from the tape, down over the trim to protect it that way.

@JLeslie I’ve always used the cheapest base available. About a year ago hubs bought a more expensive base and it was a nightmare. If you ran back over an area you’d painted, about 45 seconds later, it pulled away with the roller. Maybe it was the base type?

Choosing the paint colour.

There’s something truly awful about not realizing until the job is done that you just painted your bathroom the colour of stale urine.

Actually, this is probably the most critical part of the process.

@JLeslie That can happen when you paste the tape on hard and a thick layer is attached. Also make sure the paint underneath isn’t already loose so when you pull the tape you aren’t yanking a big chunk of the old paint that will take the new paint with it.
I did forget one essential important step. Dust off your walls and wipe it down with a damp rag. Make sure the rag isn’t going to leave stuff all over your wall. To save time. I take several clean dish towels and wet them all and wring them out and then go over the wall after I dusted them.
My biggest pet peeve is seeing dust trapped under the paint. It’s why I hate hiring people. They don’t bother to clean unless you point it out and then you have to be on top of them. They will paint over anything. I wipe everything first. Let it dry and then paint. The paint job gets a flawless look and sticks better to a clean wall.
If you are doing the kitchen. Then you really have to clean it all really well. Grease and smoke from cooking sticks to your walls.
Kitchen is the worst room to paint. Ugh!

@Dutchess_III My eyesight sucks. Well for reading. But somehow, when there is the tiniest paint mishap on an edge it grows larger and larger. I can spot it from across a room once it is noticed.

@Seek Man those horrid colors! I have a saga…......back in 2007 I experimented with a light green for an outdoor, wooden table, even though I prefer a dark green. Fortunately I realized right away that it was “baby poop green,” not the “fawn green (or whatever)” that they said it was, so I was saved. I told my Wis.dm friend, Balmung (was his user name there) about it and he thought that name, baby poop, was so funny! Of course, he’d never had any babies at the time so he couldn’t quite understand.

Two years later, same table. Again tried going with a lighter color of blue, to highlight some new couch cushions I had bought. Argh!!! Baby poop BLUE!! Vomitus. Balmung laughed and laughed.

Fast forward to present day. I recovered some patio chairs with a nice dark to light orange fabric. (This is before I actually covered them, just to give me an idea.)
Well, I went to pick paint to paint that table again. I settled on a dark orange, but my husband, and everyone else at Walmart said, “No! You have to go with the lighter orange!”
OK. Fine.
One swipe…and there is is. BABY POOP ORANGE!!!! I messaged Carlos (he hasn’t been Balmung in a long, long time) on FB to tell him. And he laughed and laughed.

You can see the baby poop blue under the sanded areas. sigh.

I’ll just take it back and have them start adding black until I get a tremendous orange color no one has ever dreamed of before. :/

I’m starting to re-consider my response. Priming and edging are important but I think that the worst mistake I’ve made painting (in my beginner room painting days) was not allowing enough drying time – after priming/after edging/between coats. The non-painting time is really important.

Hah! From she who has spent the last 7 days painting to the tune of about 36 hours total. lol
Yep, I am with @Espiritus_Corvus taping and masking, and washing your brushes and rollers really thoroughly. I was painting the ceiling the other day and dumped an entire little bucket of paint right down the front of me. What a fucking disaster that was. haha

Rick painted our ceiling a couple of weeks ago. He used a sprayer.

@Pandora The painters I hired in TN had sandpaper on a stick, like a mop with a sandpaper rectangle (more like a brick shape) at the end. They used that to quickly sand off the walls before applying the new paint.

@Seek GA!

Oh, not here. They charge you an arm and a leg and do a crap job.

Masking

planning and preparation of the walls