The easy way to paint a house is by using a paint sprayer. But painting a house also involves some prep work to make the job go smoothly and to get the best results.
Stephanie and Vicki Kubiak of Mother Daughter Projects used a paint sprayer to paint Stephanie’s house. Here they walk you through all the steps involved.
Easy Way to Paint a House
Deciding to paint a house can be a matter of need, to add curb appeal, or a matter of color preference. For Steph, it was color. Ever since she moved into her home, she has wanted to paint the outside of the house a new color. We just finished cleaning the vinyl siding parts of her house so the painted stucco part was really looking drab by comparison.
We were given the opportunity to paint the house using the Wagner Flexio 970 Sprayer and BEHR exterior paint.
We’ll talk about it more later, but using the paint sprayer was the only way we could have managed this job. We learned that stucco is hard to paint with traditional methods. The paint sprayer made it a doable DIY project that many homeowners could undertake themselves. (paint-house-supplies)
Materials
- Cleaning brushes
- Leaf blower
- Ladder
- Garden hose with sprayer tip
- Home Armor E-Z House Wash
- DAP caulk
- Exterior Painter’s Tape
- Pre-Taped Painter’s Plastic Drop Cloth with Dispenser
- Scrap paper for masking
- BEHR Exterior Paint
- Wagner Flexio 970 Sprayer
- Long handled paint roller
- Paint brush
- (2) Five-gallon buckets for cleaning
- Dish washing detergent
Prepping
Anyone who has ever painted anything will tell you that the prep work takes the most amount of time. Our painting project was no exception.
Here’s what we did to get ready to actually paint.
Choose a color
We picked Behr Premium Plus Ultra Exterior Satin Paint in Grey Flannel. If your home is part of an homeowners’ association be sure to have your color choice approved.
Buy paint and materials
Start with a minimum of 5 gallons of paint.
Remove hardware from the house
This includes house numbers, light fixtures, flag pole bracket, etc.
Repair cracks and holes
We filled in cracks in the stucco and used DAP caulk to seal around the garage door and under one window.
Brush or blow loose dirt
Go over the walls, soffits, and gutters. If needed, trim any bushes close to the painting area and rake organic material away from the foundation.
Wash the house
We spent a lot of time determining how we were going to clean the stucco—pressure wash or house wash. We decided to wash the house much like we had just done to clean the siding.
We attached the Home Armor house wash to the hose and sprayed everything down. We let it set for 10 minutes, scrubbed some of the dirtier areas and then sprayed it down with clean water. We worked in small sections so it didn’t have a chance to dry.
Note: Wear old clothing as the Home Armor can bleach your clothing. We let the walls dry for a full 24 hours.
Mask anything you don’t want painted
While the siding was drying, we started masking the door, windows, soffits, gutters, and outlets.
The pre-taped painter’s plastic drop cloth was really handy for taping off the doors and windows. We also were advised by an associate at our Home Depot to use the exterior 3M tape. We needed something to flex around the large curved window and he suggested this product—it was perfect!
Painting the House with a Paint Sprayer
Read and follow instructions on the paint sprayer. We found the instructions to be very straight forward, well illustrated, and easy to understand. The large quick-start fold out was especially convenient.
We didn’t have any particular difficulties getting it set up and ready to go. The cool thing about this sprayer is the pump goes right into the paint bucket—no extra container needed!
Spray the large sections of walls. We sprayed almost to the point where the soffits meet the wall.
Follow the spraying with a paint roller. If the paint sags at any point or doesn’t fully cover, smooth this out with a roller or brush.
Roll or brush hard to reach areas. We chose to hand paint areas that we could not safely mask off (like the area above the large curved window).
Clean the sprayer. Clean up can be a chore with sprayers, but this one took only 20 minutes and wasn’t complicated. The two five gallon buckets are used to provide clean soapy water in which to run through the spray gun and tubing. Follow the instructions included with the sprayer.
The Completed Paint Job
Remove all masking material.
Touch up where needed. At this step, we hand rolled a fresh coat of white paint on the garage.
What We Learned
Check the extended weather forecast before starting. We had a deadline in which to paint the house. We ended up having a window of only 2½ days of sunny weather in which to start and finish the house. If you’re planning on painting be sure to check the weather and plan accordingly.
Choose the painting tool that matches the surface you are painting. A paint sprayer was the perfect tool for this project. We have used two different paint sprayers in the past with very poor results so we were a little hesitant about using this one. We have to say that we were pleasantly surprised at how well the sprayer worked. After experiencing how difficult it was to paint stucco with a brush and roller, we realized that using a sprayer was the only way to go. It made very short work of the actual painting process.
The gray we chose for the house is absolute perfection and fits in very well with the surrounding homes in the neighborhood.
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