Should You Back Roll After Spraying? Pro Painter Tips You Need to Know!

Hey, this is Chris the Idaho Painter. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. This is one of many videos out of my new construction course. Everything you need to know about a painting a new construction interior. If you want to see that course, it's over and available at paintlifeupply.com. Hopefully enjoy this video. We've got a lot more that you can see later on. Right. In this uh video, I'm going to be talking about uh back rolling. And I know that might be a question or topic that would come up when uh when I'm doing the priming and stuff. So, you know, we'll talk a little bit about, you know, just back rolling in general. So, back rolling enhances penetration and enhances adhesion on a porous surface. So, a surface like glass, you know, glass is non-porous. It's very slick and stuff. And so if you were to like say a smooth metal door, a piece of glass, you spray some paint on there, back rolling it is not going to, you know, help you out when it comes to uh pushing the product into a porous surface or enhancing the penetration or adhesion. But if you're doing like um like rough saw wood uh T111 siding anything that's porous drywall you know back rolling could uh be beneficial to enhance you know penetration and adhesion. So now um the subject is you know when I'm doing you know an interior new construction you know house do I need to back roll the walls? So down here this scenario we've got a texture on here. This is Sun Valley texture. It's what we call Sun Valley here in Idaho, Treasure Valley. Some people call it skip trout. Some people might call it something else. And where you can see white is the topping or mud skimmed over the drywall and right over the drywall paper and where it was taped, which the paper is the gray. So you have kind of like these smooth voids. So predominantly this wall is a really smooth wall. When they're when they're eventually painted, they're super smooth. you rub your run your hands down there, you can just lightly see these voids, but it's kind of like a level five finish with just some voids in it. It's a really cool looking texture. So, the question is, you know, should I back roll this, you know, to enhance the penetration of the primer when you spray it on there? Now, the primer I'm actually using is a PVA primer, which is a polyvinyl acetate primer. It's designed to be sprayed right over drywall topping and um mud and over drywall and and it's kind of a thin primer product that's you know intended to just absorb right in soak and seal the rock and the drywall and um the topping or the mud and seal it so you get an even finish you know as a top coat. It's not designed to back roll. So what would happen if you backrol this wall you know because your thought process hey I need to you know enhance penetration or you know make touchups for the homeowner or for me as this you know house gets you know progresses flooring gets installed cabinets gets installed people nicking and dinging the walls if I was to take and spray this and back roll it the the primer is not designed to be back rolled and so it's going to what we call stipple really bad so it's going to take a smooth finish and now add stippling to it. And that in itself is going to probably for you know in our area a lot the homeowners, the builders, they're not going to like it cuz they're expecting a smooth Sun Valley texture or skip tri finish. And back rolling the primer isn't beneficial to you at all either because you're going to be top coating over that primer. When you're spraying your top coat, you're going to be atomizing the paint, which actually changes the sheen and changes the color, you know, slightly through the atomization and the crushing of the paint going through the airless tip. And so that in itself means that you um you're still going to have touch-up problems. So if you were actually going to back roll anything, you would spray your PVA primer on, which is designed to be sprayed and not back rolled. Then you would spray and back roll your top coat on there that's going over the top of your primer. And um that way, you know, if you were to get a nick in the middle of this wall right here and you touched it up with a brush, it's not a sprayed on finish. And so it's more likely going to match and not leave, you know, a spot on the wall that has a different color or a different sheen doing the touchup. So, it there's, you know, a time and a place for everything. I would say also, you know, um, you know, you would only want to be back rolling if you're using a paint that is designed to back roll. Now, most contractor grade paints that we're using in new construction aren't really designed to back roll. They're they're less expensive. They don't have flow and leveling agents in them. So when you back roll them over the top of your primer, it doesn't flow and level and smooth out. So it's going to stipple it. So if you stipple your primer and then you spray on a top coat on top of that and you back roll that, now you've even added more stippling and more texture to your wall, which is not desirable. So, if I had any like option, if I wanted to back roll because I wanted to make touch-ups easier for me, touch-ups easier for the customer going down the road road and I wanted to back roll, I would spray my PVA primer on, and then I would spray a paint that was designed to back roll. And that's going to be a more expensive, higherend paint. And I know there's a paint Benjamin Moore Aura is um is a paint that actually has flow and leveling agents in it. Uh cashmere, I've actually got experience with both of those products. And Cashmere was actually designed for like level five finishes, smooth wall finishes, and that will flow out and level out, you know, pretty nicely. If you back roll this wall, if you spray cashmere on there and you back roll it, it's still going to stipple it to a certain extent. So, if the customer is expecting this wall to be, you know, completely smooth, you um you're going to have to explain that ex, you know, that expectation to them that it's not going to be smooth. You have to explain that to the builder, too. So, if the builder is not um if he sees Sun Valley Texture all over the place and you're a new painter come in and you spray and back roll it and it's not what he's accustomed to, you know, coming from his other painters, you may end up running into a problem. So, I think there's once again there's, you know, you're going to have there's a time and a place for everything. I would say predominantly, you know, most new construction painters do not back roll anything. And I would say really the reason why is it takes more time and eventually it costs you more money because it's more labor intensive. Somebody's spraying, somebody's right behind them back rolling and so you're adding another person that's um the same amount of time, you know, and labor as it is the person to spray. Then it's also extremely critical when you're actually back rolling. So, I got a PVA primer on there that's still just a primer. I'm spraying the paint on the wall. If I spray, you know, halfway around the room and then somebody starts back rolling it, your paint's going to start drying, you know, very, very quickly and coagulating very quickly and you're going to start back rolling it. It's going to stipple it even worse. So, the back roller has to be like right behind you. if you're not, you know, priming at all and which is very common in the new construction industry is a painter just coming in and spraying this, you know, one and done. Blow and go is what they say. Now, you're going to be spraying the paint on, loading it on pretty heavy. it's going to be absorbing really fast into the drywall and the mud and it's going to be drying quickly and that's going to cause, you know, um, coagulation, drying, stippling, all kinds of issues with having, you know, not a smooth texture. And I'll just kind of give you an example like how do I know all this? Well, um, a lot of the stuff I teach is from experience. So, I never back rolled, you know, anything in new construction. I uh ran into a job site uh new brand new builder uh new home couple million dollar home and I you know brought it up to the builder. Do you want this Sun Valley texture back rolled explained you know um what it is uh and the benefits to it, the drawbacks to it, everything. And he said absolutely I want you to back roll it. I'll pay you the extra to back roll it. We sprayed back rolled the whole entire thing. customer came in was extremely upset um pissed off basically and um because their expectations which wasn't communicated you know from the builder that that there would be stippling on the walls and um you know from back rolling it and they were extremely unhappy and what happened um I was kicked out the job. So, uh, once again, sometimes I just like to give, you know, realworld examples and so you don't run into the same thing I did down the road. So, it's a little bit about back rolling. You're going to have to decide, you know, for yourself. Uh, I'm not back rolling this situation. I didn't back roll the PVA. I'm not going to be back rolling the top coat either, but I'm going to be spraying, you know, a pretty high-end top coat on there that's going to lend myself to um being successful doing touch-ups, even if I get a nick or ding in the middle of the