Pressure Washing Your Home Before You Paint is Vital

Keeping your home looking nice on the outside isn't usually a huge commitment of time other than landscape maintenance projects such as mowing the yard, planting flowers and keeping the shrubbery trimmed back. But every five to ten years or so, your home may begin to look faded from the elements and that means you need a paint job.

Painting is an art form, even exterior home painting. That means you simply can't go from the decision to paint your home to picking out the color of paint to the finished product itself. There is one major step in between selecting your color and applying it and that is the dreaded prep work.

When it is done correctly, the prep work may take up the majority of time for your paint job but it is also what guarantees that your job will turn out looking professional rather than amateur with sloppy paint lines and overspray on your windows.

The first step in the preparation process is pressure washing the home. You can do this step yourself if you want to save money on your painter, but it is a messy and wet process and most people opt to have a professional do it for them. Pressure washing shots water with enough immense force to strip off peeling paint, dirt, grime, insects and spiderwebs and everything else that is between your old paint job and the new paint job. This way, the paint will adhere and look good.

Pressure washing your home is also a good way for your painting contractor to check for undetected surface damage to your home that need to be fixed such as loose siding, gutters or soffit and fascia.

It can take several days for your home to dry, depending on the weather. But the wood must be completely dry before your painter can finish the job. Once it does dry, the painter will need to manually scrape away any peeling paint that didn't get blasted off. The last bit of prep work is masking off your windows and putting tarps down and even though at this stage of the process your home has probably become the blight of neighborhood, it is all a process in art.

After all of this prep work including pressure washing is done, your painter can finally get to the final stage and that is the actual spraying of your house with color. After the time consuming wait for the other aspects of this process you will be delighted to know the final stage is brief- your house will likely be done in a day with the touch up and unmasking of windows done the next day as things dry.

And your home will go from being the neighborhood blight to the neighborhood dazzler within a week and you won't have to go through it again for at least another decade which works great because by then your neighbors will have forgotten the annoyance and you'll be ready for a new color.