How to Prep a House for Painting

So you’re looking to prep a house? How to prep a house for painting is the most important part of a paint job to get right– definitely more important than the actual paint job. If you don’t prep right, the paint will go on unevenly and then peel, flake, and make your house… well, look like it needs a paint job. 

Thus, it’s worth an article to discuss the tedious but critically important subject of how to prep a house for painting. Though this article will not provide you the level of detail you might need,  it will explain the process and give you a better idea of what you’re getting yourself into!

Anyone could paint a “Mona Lisa” with that much flat surface to work with. Heck, Monet’s “The Water-Lily Pond” even looks like the side of a house. Thus, we prep a house for painting to make every paintable square inch as smooth as possible. 

The idea is to take broad strokes and zoom in as you go. So to begin, you can rinse the whole outside of your house with a garden hose and scrub it down with a scrub brush. 

Next, you’ll want to take much more care as you go over the whole exterior of the house with a wire brush or something equally rough and stiff to remove all the loose paint you can find.

Now that there’s much less depth to even out, you can apply a surface repair compound to smooth over any trouble areas. Wait for it to dry and sand flat. 

After you’ve tamed the wide-open spaces of your home’s siding, it’s time to do the same around every window and door. Remove old caulking like you’ve been removing paint and replace it with a new, paintable outdoor caulk. 

Finally, you can cover your landscaping with tarps and drop cloths , and move on to primer.

In short, the finer points of how to prep a house for painting are perhaps the best reason to hire a group of professionals. If it was just about covering the whole thing with a new color twice (at least), it would be a long, boring job. 

But unless you want to make this a weekly thing, you have to prep your house for painting first, which is a longer, more-boring job. When you’re shopping for a trusted exterior painting company , make sure to ask about their prep process. Ask questions that are as detailed as you’d like. It’s worth the talking to make sure it gets done right the first time!