Painting the Exterior of a House-Preparation

Steve White: Hi, my name is Steve White with Mastercraft Painting. Today, we are going to be talking just a little bit about scraping and sanding. That's the second step in the preparation of the painting of your home's exterior right after washing. Lot of people might be tempted to skip this step or not do it complete or thorough enough but what that's going to do is going to cause the coating that you put on to fail prematurely. So very important to use the proper tools and the proper methods and you take your time and to do the job right because it's going to make the paint job last a lot longer.

Professionals like myself, we have grinders which can be a little bit dangerous or vibrating sanders which are a little bit more user friendly for the home owner. I will highly recommend using these because it's are going to speed up the process and it's going to make it a lot better job also. You can do just the sandpaper folded up and do a little sheet and sand it, feather all the edges after you take the scraper or like I said the power sander is going to get the job done a lot faster.

The sanding is critical for two things. The rough edges were -- after you are done with the scraping you want to feather these out so that doesn't have a tendency to lift later on and also it's just going to provide us a smoother more aesthetic appearance for the final product. All the surfaces that you want to sand or basically all the trim, we have got the wood trim over here and any metal gates or fences you know you want to sand, sand all these surfaces smooth before you start to applying any paint.