Painting Over Tape & Caulking Tips & Tricks

this chris idaho painter here on paint live tv today i'm going to be talking about a subject we keep getting asked a lot at our store paint life supply co and that's peeling off your tape and it pulling the tape off the wall or the substrate that you are masking on or adjoining too so if you want to know how to stop that frustrating annoying thing of peeling the paint off the wall stay tuned for this video [Applause] [Music] all right so i'm going to get on with the topic of the paint uh peeling up the wall when you're pulling your tape so you know what actually causes this so typically you know what the scenario looks like is you're running your tape on the wall you're running it around your trim or your door jam something and you're painting over that so you can get perfectly straight lines without having to spend years and years learning how to cut in and it's just a fast and easy way to get laser straight lines commonly used method using frog tape even caulking over your frog tape but what is actually happening is and especially if you use anything other than a flat paint so you're going to use like a satin paint a semi-gloss paint gloss paint or even eggshell paints you know there's enough acrylic in those paints to make them flexible and stretchy and if you allow the paint to dry on the tape and it's going to be drying on the tape and then it's going to be drying onto the wall when you go to start pulling off your your tape off of your surface that it's masked onto the um the paint is stuck to the tape it's actually stuck to the wall and it's what we call bridging and it's going to be stretching and pulling off the wall because paint typically takes about 30 days to dry and cure and really bond and bite to the surface now you're not going to sit there and let your tape sit you know on the surface for 30 days and allow it to cure on the wall so it's more likely to peel off more or less likely to peel off the wall you're typically pulling that when it's dry you know within a several hours or maybe the next day but the problem is is the paint is drying it's not bonding to the surface it has enough acrylic in in it that it's stretching and pulling and then it pulls away in the surface and it kind of um snaps into what we call like little sharks teeth or jagged edges and that is very frustrating so how do you stop that from happening and you stop that from happening by not allowing your paint to dry and and that goes for your caulking too because the same thing will happen with your caulking your caulking is flexible it's stretchy it's going to dry on to the tape it's going to dry on to your wall or your surface that you're masking onto and away from and it's just going to stretch and pull and pull off and jagged edges so there's two things that cause this is your caulking drying on your tape and the surface and your paint drying on the the tape and the surface so you can't let either one of them dry so you've got to caulk it you've got to paint it and then you've got to pull it before both of them dry are you enjoying the video so far are you finding it helpful hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell that way you'll get notified every time we come out with more of this free content and now let's get back to the video now i i hear a lot of people you'll you'll see me caulk or you'll see me paint over my caulking right away and you're going to hear people saying you can't do that you can't do that well i got a product right here this is i'm a product from tower it's called accelerator so specifically dot design so you can paint over it immediately and one of the great things is is you can paint over it with flat paints and the paint is not going to crack there's one of the things about painting over wet caulking is if you paint over it with flat paints the uh the paint will actually crack if you paint with paint over it with like a um a satin or a semi-gloss there's enough acrylic in the paint that it won't actually crack over the caulking but accelerator was specifically made to eliminate those types of issues so i'm a great caulking good product to use if you're using flat paints what happens with flat paints if you paint over your tape allow it to dry on your tape and allow it to dry on the wall and you pull your tape and it would typically give you a crisp clean line well why is that well flat paints don't have nearly the amount of acrylic in it that a satin does or a semi-gloss and it does because that's what gives the build the paint the the flexible enough the flex flexibility the stretch ability it gives it the durability the washability and that's why typically flat paints aren't washable they're not very durable you scrub them and they're not very scrubbable the paint comes right off the wall and by nature they're just not as much a resin or acrylic in that paint and so it will actually when you pull the tape it will like snap and they'll still pull in a straight line so um using flat tapes a lot more for our flat paints a lot more forgiving so getting back to how you stop it you have to you know caulk you have to paint over your caulking and you got to pull it while it's wet and then i'm sure somebody's gonna ask me well well what about if you got a two coat now if you've got a two coat on your first coat on your walls we're going to be rolling our first coat we're gonna stay about a sixteenth of an inch away from our tape so we're not going to get paint uh bridging from our wall or our surface to our tape and drying across that bridge right there so first coat you're gonna stay away from your tape second coat you're going to caulk if you're going to caulk if you're not going to caulk you're just going to do your cut in and then you're going to roll your second coat and you're going to pull your tape right away while it's wet this is the cure to not um having your uh your paint pull off the wall or peel off the wall or whatever surface you're actually painting onto you've got to pull your tape before the caulking dries got to pull your tape before um the paint dries and um it's a simple little thing sometimes you're gonna have to work from just wall to wall because if you try to do a whole room it once and then come back and pull it it's it's gonna be dry and it's going to peel off so if you're doing like new construction and you're spraying you know um sometimes it's a little bit hard to pull while it's wet and you can allow it to dry but you know you're going to have a lot more success if you're using flat paint so there's a little bit of a little bit of discussion about why it's happening how to resolve it um if you've got any tips or tricks of how to stop your paint from peeling off the wall you know just let us know down in the comments section below you know we learned from you just like you learned from us if you got anything from this video just hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell that way you get notified every time we 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