How to Control Overspray When Staining a Fence | Professional Tips for a Clean Job

hey this is Chris Idaho painter hopefully enjoy this free video Lesson on fences and decks this is part of my comprehensive course over at paint life supply.com the whole course goes into marketing it goes into estimating it goes into how to professionally stain fences decks and perolas so hopefully you enjoy this lesson and thank you very much for watching in this video I'm going to be talking about prepping and masking now this is something kind of unlike interior and exterior painting where you're doing a lot of prepping and masking doing defense decks and pergas there's not as much masking and protecting that you got to do but there is going to be some so what would you um actually mask I would say probably the most con common scenario that you're going to run into when doing fences that's probably the most common thing we actually stain now typically a fence is going to run into some type of structure at some point in time it's going to butt up against a house is the most common scenario now why would you actually mask that off if if you get any type of overspray even a drip on that house more than likely that house hasn't been recently painted and it could be extremely difficult to touch up now if the house was painted 5 years ago and you get overspray on it and the customer doesn't have any of the paint left over from when it was painted that's going to be a big problem so we always you know Mass the control overspray massive control drips anything getting where we don't want it and more than anything you don't want it on a house where the touchups could be difficult or where you could end up running into painting the whole side of a house or repainting the whole house itself because of overspray so when the house runs into or where the fence runs into the house typically stretch out 72in masking film down the sides we stretch it up the top we protect that you'll surface an area from overspray continuing over the top of the fence or down the fence line onto the house another thing you know will'll run into is decks you got a deck and typically a deck is going to be buted up against a structure a house where people are going to be coming out of the house onto the deck wherever that deck is buted up against that structure you're going to want to mask the most common thing we do there is we typically don't stretch plastic up the house we'll just run a row of 9in paper along the deck cuz we're going to be cutting in along the deck and then we'll be working our way out if we're going to be using a sprayer so we typically don't have to run you know plastic up the side of the house if you are going to be spraying up against the house then you you may want to just run plastic up the house 72in film to protect it so it's better safe than sorry you know um in the end another thing where we're going to be you know masking and using possible plastic is where we're covering plants now we will'll cover plants with drop clo also and I'll talk about drop cloth here in a minute but a drop cloth if you're draping them over sensitive flowers sensitive plants where you could be breaking the flowers snapping off Rose you know flowers or any type of decorative flowers we'll drop it with plastic so we'll use 9x 400 plastic or we'll use our 72in masking film you know that's significantly more expensive than 9 by 400 plastic but plastic is another handy tool to protect from drips and over spray and plastic you know if it gets any oilbased products out on it you just roll it up throw it away at the end of the day and it's not a big mess so other than paper tape and plastic well um there's the other option and that is using drop cloth where would we use drop cloth versus paper tape and plastic we're typically always going to be working over a walkway we're going to be dropping drop cloths on the walkway maybe over a gate where a gate swings over a walkway it's going to be underneath the gate if you're working overhead a pergla a gazebo we're always dropping the whole entire concrete area that we're going to be working on to cover that I don't want to have just one drop cloth underneath where I'm working we typically have enough drop cloths we can cover the whole area any type of curbing a lot of times there could be decorative curving that can run up against the fence we're going to drop cloth to uh put a drop cloth over any type of decorative curving plants a ground cover that could withstand the weight of a drop cloth we're going to put the drop cloths down on those plants but what you don't want to do is take a heavy drop cloth that's been used for years and years that's got a lot of added weight of overspray on it throwed on on top of you know plants where you're going to damage them now here's something that you might not think about but a lot of things I talk about in my videos is because of past experience I do use oilbased products now quite often but if you are using drop cloth and you're using oilbased products if you get overspray or you spill oil on a drop cloth when you go to fold that up the products that we use they will not dry if you are using oilbased products that dry when you fold the drop cloth up it's actually going to stick tack to each other glue the drop cloth together when you go to unfold the drop cloth it's going to damage it's going to tear the drop cloth especially if it's a Beal drop cloth so we've actually damaged ruined drop cloths by using oilbased products on them so if I'm using oilbased products we typically are always trying to side towards using plastic if plastic is not an option or a better option 4x8 rolls or 4x8 uh roll of uh paper we'll roll it down I've done you know recently did a rod iron fence where it was up against um grass and then the other side was a walkway we just rolled that um 4ft paper out tacked that down and that ended up being our substitute instead of a drop cloth cuz we actually using oil oilbased product the oilbased products just take longer to dry if you're using a water-based stain waterbase uh products they dry really really fast by the end of the day you could actually fold your um your drop cloth up and it's not going to attack and stick together they act a lot like you know water-based paints when they get overspray on them it dries extremely fast and you don't have to worry about your drop cloths basically getting all glued together and getting damaged oilbased products the ones we use they're actually non-drying oils so if you get a lot of oil on that drop cloth you actually fold that thing up when you go to unfold it and reuse it again the drop cloth could have the wet oil on it that could actually transfer whatever you're actually using on say you walked into a customer's house and now you lay out this drop cloth on their nice beautiful carpets that oil could actually transfer to the carpet so whenever we're using oilbased product we do not use our drop cloths once we get everything masked you know to control overspray your masking uh does really well but it's not practical to actually put masking paper masking plastic on the grass on the rocks on the ground and you can't actually mask over the top of the fence so we actually use cardboard Shields they're 36 in you know cardboard Shields 36 in by 12 in they hook to a cardboard Shield you know I use that to Shield the dirt I typically don't want overspray getting on the dirt even though it doesn't matter just is not a good look we try to Shield as much as we can we Shield rocks there's a lot of time there's decorative rock underneath the fence the grass even though the grass is going to be mowed it's going to be edged and that's all going to go away it's not a good look to actually get overspray especially if you're using like a solid color stain that's going to you know show up extremely bad when the customer shows up say you're doing a white fence a white picket fence and you get white overspray all over the grass it's probably going to be there for a week if you're using like a transparent or semi-transparent oilbased stain you're probably not even going to hardly see it at all but it's still a good look just to actually Shield it over the top of the fence we use a cardboard Shield to control overspray over the top when you come to the end of the fence we you know use a cardboard Shield to control overspray from whipping around the backside or around the end of the fence or even when we're doing a gate that swings open we'll use a cardboard Shield to swing the gate so that's a little bit about you know the prepping the masking what we do you know where we do it when we get ready to do these type of projects