How to Paint Exterior Shake Siding Like a Pro | Best Paint, Sheen & Spraying Tips

right. Today I'm going to give you a few tips when it comes to painting shakes. So I have some, you know, shakes right here. Whenever I'm painting shakes, I want them to look like they were actually wood shakes and and have, you know, that flavor, that uniqueness to them. One of the things I always do with my shakes is I paint them flat. So, I don't want them to look like the siding. I typically paint the siding uh satin because I want it to be durable. I want it to be, you know, cleanable, washable. There's uh wood shakes. They're cedar. So, you'll see cedar shakes. There's um concrete shakes, which are hardy plank shakes. And then there's these shakes right here, which are composite shakes. So, they look like wood shakes, but they're made out of the same material as this sighting is made out of. It's just some ground up fibers glued together, uh, pressed and got a like a paper over the top of it and it looks like wood, but it's not. If the shakes are, uh, concrete sided, same thing. Concrete sighting, hardy plank, we paint it. It comes out pre prime. I'm going to paint it once again flat because I want it to look true. You do not want to paint wood shakes. You want to add a wood stain to them. If you paint wood shakes, they're more likely going to peel. A stain is going to absorb into the wood and it's self priming. You're not going to have to prime it. So, that's a proper way to do wood shakes and your stains are flat. And so, the stains um will keep the the shakes looking true. A lot of times the shakes, for some reason, they blister really bad. And they do blister in the seams really bad. prior to doing any uh painting of a flat paint, I'll go up there and I use triple thick primer and I'll um prime all the blistering and it's typically once again I take a brush and it's in those slats. It's very common that that there's blisters in there. You want to fill those blisters in. You want to glue those things together before you paint them. You don't want to do any anything like that after, you know, the the painting process. So, it's it's pretty typical. I'd go up there and you'll see, you know, triple thick primer all over those slats. I don't know why for some reason those blister, you know, more than say like the siding. It could be like on those gable ends, the gables get a lot hotter cuz it's in the attict and and it's not, you know, insulated like it is on the the side walls. But triple thick primer is a super high resin primer that will glue all that blistering together. Then I'll spray it. Another tip, when I spray the um the shakes, now I say when I spray the siding, I go with, you know, the grain of the siding that the the siding runs, you know, horizontally and I spray horizontally. When it comes to the shakes, you don't want to spray horizontally on the spray shakes. You want to spray vertically. You've got all these vertical random lines on there, and if you spray it vertically, you it's less likely that it'll be noticeable when you do that. So, uh, that's a tip that I always like to, you know, tell my guys, spray vertically. And then another thing is the bottom of the shakes are flat. And so, if you spray at it flat, that bottom, you know, like quarter inch,/ inch of each one of those laps of the shake, it's not going to get paint on it. And it is pretty open and it's pretty porous. So, you want to definitely be shooting up at an angle. So when I'm shooting the shakes, I'm I'm spraying at an upward motion. So my gun, it's going to be turned this direction. I'm going to be shooting it up in an angle like this. So I'm getting up underneath each one of those laps of the shakes. Sometimes it's difficult cuz you're on a high ladder and and stuff, but try to practice those techniques. If you do all that stuff, all these tips I've given you, your shakes will look amazing just like those shakes, too. So just some tips and tricks when it comes to painting shakes.