How to Paint a House Exterior by Yourself: Everything You Need to Know to Paint Like a Pro.

This is Chris Adop painter here on Paint Life TV. Today I've got another solo series. I got a house behind me. It's a small one. I'm going to try to paint this thing solo in two days. I did another solo series where I did a two-story very complicated house and it took me about 8 days. So, if you want to see me paint this house alone in two days, stay tuned for this video. This is also going to be part of painters care. It's going to be giving back to our community and a World War II veteran. This guy served our country PPG is going to be providing the paint free of charge due to this man's service to our country. So, if you want to see this video, me painting a World War II veteran's house solo in two days, stay tuned for this video. [music] All right, we're out here. It is day two, [music] actually, cuz I was out here yesterday. I did the power washing. It took me about an hour to power wash this house. Uh very simple, easy. It's just singlestory. I don't I think I'm going to be able to do this house with probably a 6ft ladder, maybe. Well, I got one peak. I'm going to have to get my extension out ladder out to uh do the two peaks on the sides. But very simple, easy to do. I should be able to paint this house in two days solo alone. I'm going to be using uh PPG paints. They're providing the paint here because this is part of our painters care program, giving back to our community and our uh veterans. This guy is a World War II veteran. I'm thankful to be able to come out here and paint his house. He's an amazing gentleman. So, uh thank you to PPG for providing the paint. And this is going to be hopefully two days painting the house. I'm going to be using PPG paint. I'm not sure what paint they're going to be bringing out. They're going to be bringing it here pretty soon. We'll see what their paint is going to be. I've used their interior and exterior paints. Great paints to use. Um especially their ceiling paint. But enough talking. Let's get working. I'm going to start the prepping process. There's not a lot of prep work to do. The previous paint job, there was a lot of cocking done on it. So, uh there's not a lot of cocking to do and a little bit of sanding, a little bit of priming. We're going to show you that. I'm going to be able to get painting on this house actually today. I'm my goal is to actually spray the body, do the prep and spray the body today and then do the trim and the front door tomorrow. But anyways, enough talking for the second time. Let's go get painting. [music] So, I'm getting everything ready to start my prepping. And I always like to carry multiple tubes of cocking with me so I don't have to keep walking back and forth when I run out of cocking. So, I'll keep two tubes in my pockets and then I'll start off with a tube in my cocking gun. I'm going to be using I've got a a condition of called wax bleed on this house. So, I'm going to be using a fast dry oil primer to prime the wax bleed condition, which is wax hydrocarbons coming to the surface [music] of the paint, which will cause an adhesion issue, you know, with the paint. If you've never heard of that condition, um, I've got a video talking about it and how to remedy it. So, this is our my last house exterior for the season. The weather's cooling down drastically and when it starts to cool down, it's a lot more difficult to paint a house in a day or a couple days because the paints don't dry as fast. It's hard to mask over the top of paints when they're drying slower stuff. So, it's definitely slows the process down. I'm going start um I got a little bit of sanding here. I like using a paint eater. These discs don't clog up with paint and they sand and grind extremely fast. This is a Wagner paint eater. So that paint eater makes the sanding grinding paint down really [snorts] fast. Feathers the edges of paint nicely so they're not uh ver as prominent anymore. You know with when you paint over it. Now, all this bare wood, I'm going to go over it with peel bond has the primer, and that will help feather this out. Also, You could go to the extent of replacing all this. The customer doesn't want to. It all comes down to, you know, customer's budget, what they can afford. Um, this is brick mold and it wouldn't be that difficult to replace it, but, you know, it has to be within their budget. [music] You can tell where you've gone, but I just put it on super [music] thick and heavy. We'll [music] try to clean out their gutters here too to help remedy [music] this. Cuz if you solve this problem, but you don't solve the problem of the gutters um overflowing down here, it's [music] just going to continue to cause an issue with the siding. Heat. Heat. [music] You are more [music] I know my last solo [snorts] series and people asked you know why am I just hand doing [clears throat] this primer going around and there's not that much to do and so I don't want to load up a sprayer cuz you could load up a sprayer and do it but peel bond and it's a super heavy product. [music] So, you'd have to load up a larger sprayer to prime with and and then you really have to back [music] brush it anyways to get it pushed in and get everything sealed up [music] and enhance penetration and adhesion by back brushing or back rolling. You could roll [snorts] it too. I just always liked brushing [music] and just the feel of being able to get it in with a brush versus a roller. [music] You can see I used cardboard shields just down here just to protect deck so I didn't hit the deck with the pain eater. Also, you know, wearing eye protection. I'm wearing the It's not just regular sunglasses I'm wearing. I'm wearing edge eye eye safety wear. So, especially when you're using a grinder, definitely [snorts] always want to, you know, wear safety gear when grinding. Last thing you want to do is get something in your eye and have to leave the job site to go to the doctor, you know, cuz you weren't protecting your eyes good enough. I'm going to get this cocking off here. There's reccock this I'm going to put one coat on here. I'm going let this dry and then I'm going put another coat and I'll eventually mask with frog tape when I do my second coat up against this metal so I don't get anything on this metal on my next coat. [sighs] There's cocking underneath. there. So, I'm going to just cut it in right up against that cocking [sighs] Looks like this door was recently replaced. [snorts] down here. Once I do this trim, I'm not going to coaul up against the trim here until I trim it out. Once I trim it out, I'll [snorts] coaul up against there. That way I don't get it cocking on the vinyl on that on that slider. Just a couple more windows down here. The bottom of the siding is in pretty bad condition. We have to deal with that. It's got to be really careful. That is really, really brittle. You know, here's another condition where people have asked me, you know, do you cut out the cocking or just over? You know, most of the time we're um cocking over the existing cocking, but this is a good scenario where you actually want to pull out the the cocking cuz this cocking is in bad shape and you don't want to over this cuz you're not going to be able to make it look good. So, I'm just going to cut this out and redo these seams. Let this dry out a little bit. I'm just being really careful because this say the siding is extremely brittle in this area. You can see why. Yeah, I like these knives. I got my knife and my five in one together. The two-edge knife is just one tool. Um, it's another one of those absolute gamechanging tools that, you know, every painter should have. This here is another reason I like wearing gloves. Sticking your fingers up underneath the siding. You never know what's underneath there. You what's going to catch your finger, cut your finger, scrape your finger. But I want to get that all cleaned out under there. Getting ready to do this oil primer here. And I don't want to I'm going to be rolling it with a 9 in roller because I just got this small area to do. I don't want to load up a sprayer because then you're going to have to clean up with mineral spirits and that's just a mess and it's going to take a long time faster just to roll it out. Just use cardboard shields to keep any splatter, you know, off of the pavers. Now, you only have to you don't prime have to prime the whole house. You only have to prime the areas that wax bleed shows up. And the best way to determine that is when you're who'sever power washing, we'll take identify those areas. We typically take a spray can of spray paint and every area that has wax bleed on it, we just put an X with a can of spray paint that shows us, hey, there's wax bleed right here and this area needs to be primed on this house. This I powerwashed it, so I know exactly this was really the only area that had it where it needed [clears throat] to be primed. the rest of the house. You know, the water acted like, you know, it should act on a house this old or the paint this old. I know the paint's probably 10, 12 years old or so, but in the afternoon, this side, the sun's going to hit this here pretty soon. And it gets really really hot cuz it's the afternoon sun. Tell you this primer is just if you're spraying it, it's just absolutely nasty stuff. It's um you know you when we spray it, we always wear a monkey suit. You definitely um do not spray this stuff without a monkey suit. It gets on your skin, gets on your clothes, your clothes stink. Like, heck, it's one way to stink up your house and really make your wife mad, you know, coming home with this stuff all over your skin and clothes. Don't um don't try to roll too fast either, you know, because it just will cause it to splatter. Just slowly roll. Use a good quality roller even though you're going to throw it away. Like say I'm using a premier white woven roller cuz it's going to splatter less than if you use something cheap. This color originally was a pretty dark color, too. And the color contributed to it. We're doing it a light gray this time, which the siding won't get nearly as hot. So, it's going to a lot of bugs on the one side, a lot of cinch bugs. And if you've never used bug juice, bug juice is a great product you can put in your paint that kills flying and crawling insects that land on the house. Um, no. So, something that you can do is to make um little upsell to your customers if you're a professional painter putting bug juice. And it actually works really good. I've put it in houses, gone back five, six, seven years later, and it's still killing spiders and bugs that are crawling on the house. It's a great great product that I've used for years and years. Everything's almost ready to start loading up. Take this house. It's a pretty small house. I got 8 gallons of body that I'll begin just dumping in here boxing in. I'm just going to be masking really fast. I'll be masking over the top of the trim cuz I'll be pulling it cuz I'm not going to leave my masking overnight. So, the masking goes really fast when you're pulling your masking same day. And do you see I got a down spout right here I need to take off. So, I always remove the down spouts that way I can paint behind behind them. And I just put them on buckets and spray them. And I got some dirt over here so I don't have to have drop cloths underneath them. So I'll set them on buckets to spray them. I'm typically going to run on my sprayers, my large sprayer, at least 100 ft of hose. This is an 840. [music] I got 1140. I run 150 ft of hose starting with 3/8. This is two 50 foot quarter inch hoses with my own lime green custom whip gun whip. Definitely don't want to be spraying without a a whip. I do see people out [music] there still these days spraying without a whip and all it's going to do is cause you [snorts] a lot of fatigue, wrist and arm fatigue if you don't have a whip on there. Hey, hey, hey. in every video I Shoot. Somebody's like, "Well, what about the car in the garage getting overspray on it?" These doors, once these doors are closed, they're sealed 100%. And no overspray is going to go through the slats of this door. been doing this masking process for over 20 years and I've never had overspray go through a door cuz they're sealed 100% once they're closed. Oh, get asked that question in every single video I do when I'm spraying a garage door. So, and I've had expensive expensive cars [music] in the garage and never once got overspray on them. So, I've just masked the weather strip like that. I'm going to close the garage door all the way. And then here's the next thing I get asked all the time is [snorts] I put two rows of paper and this is what I've been doing for 20ome years too. Spraying the doors and I've never got overspray outside the concrete outside the paper actually. And this is just a matter of using the right [snorts] tip, using the right pressure. Don't spray in the wind. Don't spray oilbased paints in cool weather or if it's humid outside, you know, you're not comfortable, put a drop cloth out, a runner out in front of this. But I'm 100% confident that door right there is not going to or the concrete's not going to get overspray on it. And but y'all once again this is water-based paint. Live in a dry climate. It's nice and warm today. If anything falls to the ground, it's going to fall to the ground as just [snorts] silica dust. You don't want these things touching the house that you just painted and scratching it all up. So, there we go. Take this light off and we're going to shoot this garage door. Now, I'll show you to give you a couple tips spraying garage doors. See a lot of people doing them a lot of different ways. And I'll give you some pointers how I do it and talk about why I do it the way I do it. All right. So, I'm going to spray this garage door here. [music] And what I want to do is when I spray this garage door, I'm want to just walk the distance [music] one time. So, the panels run this direction, but I'm going to spray it up and down and I'll walk the distance once. If I spray it the way the panels go, I'm going to be walking this door multiple times, and all that's going to do is cause more work and more [music] walking through the day. So, I want to walk the distance just one time. spray it from top to bottom, overlap 50% and then I'll have the door done. You don't [music] have to spray it vertically as long as you um or horizontally. You can spray it vertically. As long as you overlap 50%, you're not going to see any lap marks [music] at all. So, I like to say we paint lazy. And this is one of the paint lazy ways of painting. Try to walk as little as you can. And I start I'm going to overlap do my edges twice and then continue from there. So I'll see I see some people go around do the edges first. There's no reason to do the edges first, but I'm going to come my first lap is going to be twice cuz I want to get yo um if you're overlapping 50%, you got to hit your first run two times. So, here we go. So now the door is all done. I just spray one coat on the door. It's over overlapped 50%. And that is shot and done. Now I don't know why anybody wouldn't use an extension. You didn't. You see I didn't have to bend over very far and it's easy to keep your gun at the proper angle with an extension. You can retire, uh, reach lower, not bending over, using a gun extension, just a nice steady pace across the across the door, and it's one and done. I don't let the door dry. I'm going to let it set here for just a few minutes and then open it before it completely dries. If you allow it to dry, you better run your finger or a knife through the weather strip because the weather strip could tack to the door and you could end up ripping the door opener right out of the back of the door. So, don't let it dry or make sure you cut this um weather stripping right here. Run a 5 in one. Uh if it's if you don't raise it before it's dry, run a 5 in one through here and lift this up and make sure that that's um not tacked. I don't paint behind the weather strips. I um you you can never see it except when the door raises and lowers. And I've never had a [music] customer ever complain about it except one time the customer wanted it painted. I did paint it and then the door got really really hot during the summer. [music] It tacked to the door and uh stuck and ripped the garage door opener right out of the back. And that's my liability, my responsibility cuz I painted behind there. So, because of liability responsibility, I do not paint um behind the weather strips [music] and I don't paint inside the cracks here because that could tack together too when the door closes even after the [music] paint dries. And the only time you see this is when the door raises and lowers. And I've never had a customer ever question that and ask me [music] why I didn't paint it. So, there's a door done. Got one, two, I only got one side in the back to spray. It's about um I don't know what time is it now? 4 o'clock and I started at 10:30 and we're cruising right along. I'm pretty sure this thing will be done tomorrow. To be out [music] here painting Jack Dunn's house as part of painters care and Jack Dunn amazing as a World War II veteran. So we appreciate his service for our country and our freedom. So we thank you Jack and we want to give back and we're here to paint your house and take care of you. and make your house look beautiful again. So once again, thank you for your service to our country, man. It's absolutely an honor to meet you and paint your house. So thank you very much. You got your uniform with you. This is your actual World War II veterans uniform, right? There you go. There it is. You see it firsthand. And how you're 95 years old now, Jack? I was 95 on uh uh February 23rd. February 23rd. and you're still active and exercising, walking through the neighborhood. Absolutely amazing. I'm absolutely inspired by you and thankful that you wore this uniform protecting our country. Thank you very much, Jack. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Yeah, there you have it. Painters care painting a World War II veteran's house. All right, we're going to head on to the back. I've got everything sprayed up front. I've got down spouts sprayed. Um, I've got some touch-ups I got to do, but we're going to head to the back. I've got to mask some windows, mask some doors, and then we're going to begin finishing spraying the body, and then we'll come out and start getting this front door. This front store has got to get sprayed so we can get it back up today. So, that's very important. As you can see, temperatures are cooling down uh pretty fast. This weekend coming up here in Boise, Idaho, it's actually going to be 25°. Today, um the temperatures are going to be around the um high 50s, low 60s. After today, it's going to be drastically dropping. So, we've got to get this project done today. So, uh door is going to get sprayed today. It'll get hung back up today, and hopefully we'll get everything else done, including the touch-ups. But, I'm going to head in the back. We're going to finish spraying the back, and by the time I get around to doing the trimming towards the later part of the day, we should be able to trim that out. But I've got everything set up, ready to go. It's morning time and we're going to get to work. So, let's go. So, it is cooling off drastically here in Boise, Idaho, Treasure Valley, and some of the challenges to when the weather starts to cool off is masking starts to not stick as well. Um, you have, uh, you know, humid weather, it causes the tape not to stick very good. So that's part of the challenges also paint you know not drying very fast that becomes a challenge also and so if you got overlapping colors and stuff it starts to make the painting process you know a little bit more difficult. Um I've got kind of like overlapping colors. You'll get some overspray on…