How to Fix Bad Cut-Ins | Pro Technique to Repair Uneven Paint Lines Like a Master Painter

this is christy idaho painter here on paint live tv here i got a situation that i've got to resolve and i'm going to show you how i resolve this and this is one of these things where somebody's gotten paint all over a window this could be a ceiling too but this is a metal window where we've gotten caulking and paint on the metal window and it would almost be impossible to get it off and i'm going to show you how you can use frog tape and clear caulking to create a new line a nice straight line and a very extreme situation that'll make this look a lot better so stay tuned for this video all right so we've got um caulking and paint that has come out on this metal window uh i guess miles and miles out on the window i don't know how to even how to explain it but it's really bad so what i'm gonna do and usually you don't see it this bad but i'm gonna create a new line with frog tape and um and create a nice straight line i'm going to choose the farthest point that caulking is out on the window and then i'm going to just mask straight down from that point i don't want to have a wavy line i want to have a straight line some of it is out really far and i could just cut right through it but i'm going to choose the farthest point out which is right here and now i'm going to begin masking a straight line down this window and you don't have to use um you don't have to use clear caulking if the surface is really smooth this is a really really smooth surface so i'm not sure if it was bumpy like if it was a textured surface i definitely would be using a clear caulking so i've got a caulking gun with a dripless caulking gun that i'd be using clear caulking on but what happens with the caulking it'll on a smooth surface like this it'll leave a ridge a little tiny little ridge and i'm thinking i might not want that on this window so i'm going to just try to do it without it and we'll see how it turns out so i'm just masking this perfectly straight line down this window i'm just going to push on my frog tape so nothing will bleed through there and i've chosen a distance about a half inch you know out on this window right there just like that now i'm just going to paint as usual and the paint will bond the paint i'm using will bond and stick to that so it's classified as a self priming coating but we really know that there is no such thing as self-priming paints but now what i'm going to do is i'm going to brush paint on this and i don't want to brush really hard or i don't want to roll really hard because you'll be pressing the paint you know up against the tape and you could force it underneath the tape so i'm going to be very careful just be light-handed and just brush a nice heavy coat on this and i want it heavy enough that i don't have to come back and put another coat on here and i want to make sure i get it all the way out on my window so i don't have any missed spots and you'll end up seeing how this will correct the situation make it look a lot better now this isn't ideal but i didn't create the situation but this is a way that you can make it look significantly better so i'm just using light touches it's good to use like an interior brush like a premier hampton when doing this technique i've been painting in here using this riverdale which is a little bit stiff but it's you know working with this paint because this is a extremely thick paint now the next step once i get this painted is to not let your paint dry or your caulking dry if you were doing it on a bumpy surface if i was using the clear caulking i'd want to put that clear caulking on quickly and then get it off because if your caulking dries or your paint dries you're going to have what we call bridging and it's going to peel off from your tape to your surface you're cutting in so here we go we're going to pull it off here and see if i made you know the right choice by not using a clear caulking this time i've been doing this technique for a lot of years i've had a lot of success doing this and making corrections fixing people's mistakes so now i'm just going to grab pull this off and the color i'm painting is very similar to the window color and that's one of the reasons why i can get away with painting out onto the window you know a half inch i mean if you were a drastic change like black the white you wouldn't be able to get away with it as much but there we go got one spot whether where it bled through it probably didn't push down on my tape good enough but that is a nice laser straight line it's covered the caulking and one of the things about the exposed caulking the exposed caulking that was here that's not painted just gathers dirt and dust over time gets dirty starts to yellow so now all the caulking is completely painted and it won't yellow and this will dry and look a lot better now got a few drips we've got to correct up here carefully so now this is the frogtape blue so this is uh the same as the frogtape green except it's a contractor packed so it comes in four packs has the same polymer that swells up on the edge of the tape like green but it's just less expensive because it's in contractor packs and doesn't have as high quality of paper as the green tape so it's a great tape i was going to use clear caulking if i needed to uh caulk on a bumpy surface because that's just going to ensure that you're going to get a laser straight line with your call with your frog tape so there we go we corrected that problem i think it looks a lot better myself it'll even look a lot better once it dries if you get any bleeding through anywhere you can go back and correct it after it's completely dry i would just take a razor blade there's one little spot i had some bleeding on it and i'll correct that with a razor blade and fix that this is a simple little method i use this a lot on windows i use this method on ceilings when people have got the wall color onto the ceiling you know significantly you can just side go back and take your cut in or tape and make an edge onto the ceiling a little bit more and you know you can correct the problem hopefully you've enjoyed this simple little tip correcting mistakes that were made from previous people if you liked the video give us a thumbs up don't forget hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell that way you'll get notified every time we come out with a new video if you've got any questions or comments about this technique that i use just leave it down in the comment section below and i'll try to answer your comments or questions as soon as i can subscribe notification bell [Music]