6 Tips for Decorative Coating Prep. Painting Decorative Coatings like a Pro.

This Christy Idaho painter here on Paint Life TV today. I'm going to give you six tips to preparing your walls for a decorative finish That way when you do your decadent finish and when you're done You're going to have the perfect finish so stay tuned for six tips getting these walls ready All right tip number one. I'm getting my walls ready to apply a decorative coating here I've got several options. I'm choosing from to do a decorative finish I might do a metallic finish. I could I might do a Venetian plaster. I'm going over with the client what I'm going to do But irregardless of what I do. I want a really good surface to apply my finish on I've got some imperfections in the walls that I've already spackled and I'm going to give you a tip How I find these imperfections and if you miss anything and you start doing your decorative finish The next is going to show up in your finish. So you want to find all these little nicks and dings on your wall and get rid of those right off the back I like using just an LED light a handy one that I can I'm keeping my tool bag and hold by hand in this LED light Will make everything show up on your wall and just by shining this LED that light down the wall I can see a nick right here in this wall that I could not see prior to that after I've already did all my spackling on here I thought I was complete, but this one ding right here would show up really bad when I'm doing my metallic finish or my Whatever finish I'm doing a Venetian plaster might fill it all in, but you want to get rid of this stuff So I'm going to look all over my wall look for anything that I need to spackle using an LED light So that is tip number one. All right tip number two when it comes to getting that perfect finished with your decorative coatings Is to scrape your walls down of any little burrs that might be sticking up now I've got two tools that I keep in my tool bag I keep a two-edge knife and I keep a lid-bide scraper either one of these tools is great for scraping off any little burrs and I can use my light once again To scrape these burrs off or I can just Look without a light itself because I can see these burrs very well and this little burr right here I just scraped it right off with my linbide scraper. It's got a carbide blade on it and it'll scrape anything Anything like these little peaks that are sticking up because what happens is when you trowel over those They'll leave a little dam when the trowel actually hits it and it will make your finish not look good So I can see some little burrs sticking up on this wall here and there that I'll just want to Scrape off prior to doing any sanding so use a linbide scraper or a two-edge knife These are two great tools for just scraping off any burrs I can see a few here there This isn't as sharp is the linbide scraper so the linbide scraper just takes a lot less effort So I can use my scraper and I could even see this right here without a light so I can see it now if that'll scrape Right off so I'm just gonna go along Scrape off any perfections on my wall and then we're gonna get on to the next process to preparing our walls All right, Ron to tip number three tip number three is Sanding your wall so once I've got everything scraped once I got everything filled I'm gonna quickly go over my walls with a sander and you can use just a Little hand sanding sponge or you can use a Power sander something like this. This is gonna work a lot faster than just doing it by hand I like using my Ekisand 3x4 sander I'm gonna be using an Ekisil sponge and this is a very fine sponge because I'm not really like sanding the walls down I'm just trying to sand any imperfections off the walls or Also gonna be sanding my spackerel. So just using a 3x4 sander. I'm just gonna quickly go over my walls So I'm just cruising right along sanding now once again I you can just do this quickly by hand using a sanding sponge or just a piece of sandpaper once again I like an orbital sander if I was doing a lot bigger room I actually have a 5 inch or have a 6 inch sander to this is a really small room It's already smooth walls So I'm just quickly going over it all I needed was just a 3x4 sander and these are smooth walls so I don't have to do a whole lot of sanding but once again I want to get these imperfections Off the wall and I want these walls smooth because when I start traveling on my finish I don't want any imperfections Showing up in my finish so I've got my filling done got my scraping done and I got my sanding done And that's it for tip numbers 3 and now we're gonna go on to tip number 4 All right tip number 4 is always strain and box your paints and now if you don't strain your paint Now days Paints have a lot of debris in them whether they're high in paints or not the high-end paints have less debris in them But if you go to all this work prepping your walls get them all nice and smooth and ready for your Decor to finish and then you paint your walls and you get bits and pieces of paint on them You're just gonna have to go back and scrape and sand that off So you want to spray or not spray but strain your paints now I'm using just a five-gallon bucket screen right here to strain my paints and Make sure your bucket is also clean before putting your paints in there You could strain your paints have a dirty bucket and still get a bunch of debris in your paint So also boxing your paints. This is good practice even though this is just an undercoat for a decorative finish If it wasn't an undercoat you're gonna see this dark color It's very critical that you do box your paints that way you have color consistency from gallon to gallon And if you have to go back and do any touch-ups, you're less likely to Have those show up or see where you start and stop because of color inconsistencies now higher-end paints are less likely to have color inconsistencies than cheaper paints And that is one of the reasons why it's a beneficial to Pay more money for a premium paint now boxing your paint if you don't know the term boxing your paint It's just mixing all your paints together Into one container and then we're gonna stir that up and And then we'll be done. So I'm just gonna empty this in here And then I'll show you you can a little trick If you have just throw away latex gloves, I can take and just use throw away latex gloves to strain my paint and I won't get any paint on my hands. I could lift this up and I can allow it to drain out or if I want to do it faster. I'll have to wash my hands, but Now it's strained. I like to reuse my Strainers. I don't like to throw them away even though they're cheap. Now I can just rinse this thing off Drop it into a five-year-old bucket with water and it rinse it later and then I'll end up reusing it Now my paint is strained not gonna get any debris or any Dirt or anything on my walls once I paint them all right tip number five when it comes to getting the perfect decorative finish Is to prep with the right tape now I've got three tapes in front of me and all these are frog tape It's very critical that you do use frog tape Otherwise, you're gonna have your decorative finish bleeding underneath your tape Getting where you don't want it and you won't get laser straight lines There's something significantly different about frog tape than every other tape in the world frog tape Has a patented technology on the outside head of the tape It's a polymer that swells up with it when any liquid hits the tape and it doesn't allow anything to bleed underneath it So I'm gonna be masking down here on some cove basing and I don't want anything to bleed on that cove basing Because it won't come off and I'm going to be doing some overlapping colors and I don't want it to get on my overlapping colors And any bleeding underneath there's frog tape. This is a blue frog tape all three of these have the same technology This is a little less expensive than the green frog tape This is a premium paper comes individually packed these come in four packs. They're not a premium paper So it's a little bit cheaper. It's more like geared towards contractors This is a little bit more expensive premium paper 21-day release on this green I believe the blue is a 14-day release and if you run into any situations I mean I got another commercial bathroom I'm working on here. I did one decorative finish On and then overlapped it and I had a tape on to the one finish and I didn't want to pull off my finish that dried overnight Because I had two finishes that were budding up next to each other So I used frog tape delicate this would be for like masking on Finish you don't want to peel off masking on wallpaper stuff like that that's Delicate so frog tape yellow so you can see this is individually packed premium paper Delicate surface frog tape so whenever you're doing decorative coatings Always taking mask with frog tape All right tip number six is using the proper roller when you're applying your base coat now when I'm doing my decorative finishes I'm always undercoding them with a matte finish paint and it's very critical that you use The right roller and a high-end roller one thing you don't want to use is a cheap roller because what cheap rollers Would do with they'll leave lens on your wall after you're done painting and those lengths are gonna show up as imperfections In your decorative finish and then you also don't want a heavy stipple on your wall So I like using woven pro rollers and when I'm doing my undercoats I like using a three-inch woven pro roller. It's gonna give me a really nice smooth finish on my wall So choose the proper roller when you're doing your undercoats. I'm there's nothing Also more frustrating than having a cheap roller that leaves a lot of splatter everywhere Or does it cover very well on the cover cover very well on the wall So I'm using a good high-end paint as an undercoat on these walls I want to be using regal select to do my undercoat and once again I'm using a woven pro three-eighths inch Lint free roller All right, there you have it that's six tips to prepping your walls to get them ready to do any type of decorative finish So you're gonna have success. So your finish is gonna come out Perfect with no imperfections if you got any tips or tricks that you want to share getting your walls ready for any type of Venetian plaster metallic coating or anything just leave it down in the comment section below Don't forget subscribe to our channel hit the notification bell It's somewhere on here. You got to hit them both. It's free easy to do that way you come out or that way you get notified Every time I come out with a new video and um, I think that's it Stay tuned because I'm gonna be doing a decorative finish in here and we're gonna show you what that It's gonna look like in this commercial bathroom. I'm gonna give you some tips and tricks installing decorative finishes. So questions comments down below give us a thumbs up if you enjoy our videos free as always and out