3 Pro Tips to Spray Hardie Plank Siding Like a Painting Expert | No Flashing, Lap Marks, or Holidays

All right. In this video, I'm going to give you three tips painting Hardy Plank siding. So, look amazing. This is going to be one of the most challenging things you'll do painting an exterior is painting Hardy Plank. It's concrete siding. It's very unforgiving. It's going to show all your mistakes on there if you don't get it right. So, here's three tips on how you can get your Hardy plank looking amazing. So tip number one is we are going to paint when it's cool. So you don't always have the ability to paint when it's cool. Uh today is probably about, you know, maybe in the mid60s or so. You might be painting when it's 100° outside, 80°. I'm not quite sure what your circumstances are, but in order to have success painting Hardy Plank, you need to paint when it's cool. So, you're going to want to start off, you know, early in the morning and start painting as early as you can. You obviously can't paint when it's dark, but get up, get everything set up, and paint when it's cool. So, painting when it's cool is going to slow down the dry time. It's going to give you the ability to especially work on high sides and stuff like that and not have the paint dry so fast. So, don't wait till, you know, uh, you know, later on the afternoon till 1:00, 2:00 when you're at the hottest part of the day to start, you know, painting. You want to get up, get everything set up, get your airless sprayer loaded up, get everything ready to go, and start painting in the cool of the morning. Tip number two is going to be painting where the sun is not. So, we're going to be looking for shade. So over here, you know, the sun is rising over here on this side of the house and eventually it's going to set over here and this side over here will be all sunny. So right now the sun is it's the shade's almost disappearing. The sun's going to be on this side and then the shade is going to be on that side. On the back of the house, it's shaded the entire day. So I can actually go do the backside at any point in time I want. The shade and the sun is important because wherever the sun is shining, it's going to be super hot. It's going to cause your paint to flash dry, you know, so fast. You're going to have lap marks and it's just going to be very, very unforgiving. So I'm always going to be working, you know, on the shade side. So in the morning, I'm going to be starting in on this side. First thing in the morning, I'm going to want to spray this side over here cuz this is the shade side. As the sun sets, you know, I'll work over to this side. In the morning, the sun's going to be shining. And even though it's cool in the morning, that's going to be pretty hot over there on that side. Now, the front of the house, the way the sun comes up is over here. This is all shaded until about, you know, noon. We're getting around the noon time. The sun is starting to hit all this over here. It's starting to heat up. So, ideally, I'm going to wake up and I'm going to get out here first light, get everything set up. This side is very unforgiving when it comes to start and stops. This side over here is the most challenging part of this house to actually paint. So, I'm going to tackle that side when it's nice and cool. And then I'm going to get over here and tackle this side before the sun hits this side. If I can't, you know, work that out, I would do it the next day. Hit this side because it's the front of the house. And this is the most important part. So, you want to definitely hit this when it's cool. So, hit this side. So, I'll hit this side. And then I'll go to the back. I can go to the back at any point in time in the day. The back is like really nice and cool because it's shaded all day long. So, I can shoot the back any point in time I want. So, you definitely want to work, you know, wherever you have shade. So tip number one is you know work in the cool of the morning. Don't work in the heat of the day if you can. Tip number two is uh work wherever there is shade. The third tip I'm going to give you is painting where there is logical start and stop points. Hardy plank siding. If you stop anywhere in the middle of the siding, go back and then come back and overlap over that. It's really difficult to, you know, um, hide those overlaps. Once again, there's times and places when there's just no way you can, you know, do that and it's unavoidable. The side over there, really unavoidable. There's no way. Even with super long extensions, the weight of the extension makes it just completely impossible or impractical to do. Uh, on new construction, it's really nice cuz you can get a boom. You can rent a boom, drive a boom around here, access everything without a ladder, and you can everything. You'll have you'll have logical start and stops. But a logical start and stop point is you got a trim board between those two windows. You have your planks of siding. You go from cornerboard to trim board. You're going to work your way up. Shakes because the inconsistencies, you got shakes all over. That's really nice because you can just shoot anyway or because you want your shakes to look, you know, random and patternless. And so I typically I'm, you know, shooting different ways, different directions and stuff. So the shakes are pretty nice. You've got short runs cornerboard to trim board on a door. Over here on these high sides, you've got long expanses um where there's no windows anywhere. So, you've got, you know, uh, downbat trim boards, downbat trim boards, and you're just going to have to, you know, start and stop like in the middle someplace. It's going to be extremely important to do that when it's super cool, when it's super shaded, and work super fast and feather those, you know, start and stops. You don't want hard stop. And then you'll continue on and have these big heavy spots in your hardy plank sighting cuz you're actually going to see those and you won't see them as well now as you will see them later on down the road a year from now, two years from now. They'll really start to stand out. But you know that side over there starts and stops, logical starts and stops on that side. We got a slider. We got trim boards. We got a door door frame. Then you've got inside corners. And eventually on some of the runs, you know, you just can walk back and forth where you're um everything's single story down here. When it's single story, it makes it so much easier because you can walk everything. Sophets, you don't have to have logical starts and stops on sophets. They're um up underneath. And the sophet is a composite material. It's not your hardy plank siding. So, all the corner boards, all the trim boards, all this this material, this is not hardy plank siding. This is not concrete siding. Um, a lot more forgiving than um concrete siding. So, concrete siding is, you know, once again, unforgiving. One bonus tip I'll give you on um, you know, doing, you know, Hardy Plank sighting is if you think you're going to get it done in one coat, it's not going to happen. It's going to have to be two coats. So, Hardy Plank, I've learned my lesson from painting this stuff for years and years. You can never do it in one coat. And you can never do a fog coat and then a heavy coat. It's got to be, you know, two basically, you know, like top coats. You know, the first coat is just like your top coat. Your second coat is just like your top coat. And, you know, sometimes you got to do a third coat. So, if you're bidding hardy plank, you need to take that in consideration. A lot of sighting the um body of the house, you um we spray one coat. The house is already painted and stuff and you just spray one coat on the body, two coats on the trim. But Hardy Plank sighting, if it's, you know, this is a brand new, new construction house, it's it's two coats guaranteed, possibly a third coat depending on the color. If it's already been painted and painted correctly, you know, from my experience, even when it's painted, Hardy Plank siding still takes two coats. You know, you can try attempt to spray a heavy coat on a repaint on Hardy Plank, but from my experience, once again, it typically doesn't work out. It's always two coats. So, there's, you know, some tips, you know, when it comes to spraying um hardy plank. If you're not familiar with the term, um it's just concrete siding supposed to last a lifetime.