House Painting How To's - Prepping Your Walls for Paint/Spackling and Sanding (Series Part Two)

Hello friends, here is part two of my house painting series. I created this series because we are currently in the process of repainting our home and making it look awesome before we sell it. Over 7 years of living in this home, we definitely left our mark in this place. Its a bittersweet feeling to leave a house that you made your home, but I'm excited to start fresh somewhere else.

Check out part one in my house painting series here:

House Painting How To's - Creating Paint Swatches (Series Part One)

Step One: Removing my picture wall, and then the rest of the junk in my room.

This was probably the tedious and most annoying thing I ever had to do. Silly me from 7 years ago thought it would be a great idea to create a photo collage on my wall and not thinking about the consequences in the future. I had to take down every single picture gently because I didn't want to ruin any of them, and then I stuck them all in some random magazines since I couldn't remove the tape off the backing. I used everything from masking tape, double sided tape, packaging tape, sticky tack (really?) to stick up these photos. Let me tell you this: THEY ALL RUIN YOUR WALLS. Actually, it could of been the way I was removing them but yeah I permanently damaged my wall and ripped off a lot of paint, and even dry wall in some places. Don't stick pictures on your wall, especially with tape that isn't made to be stuck on your wall. If you're going to do this at least buy poster tape or something. 

Look how bare my wall is.

This is the only picture I took of my wall without my photos before I started spackling and filling in the holes and rips. If you recall from my first post about house painting, I painted two swatches. I ended up disliking the two original colours and bought two more samples. In the end, I didn't even choose any of the four and chose a lighter version of the one on the bottom left. If you're interested in knowing what colour these swatches are called, they are: Behr Grape Hyacinth (bottom left), Behr On Location (top one), Behr Monologue (bottom middle), and Behr Courtly Purple furthest right). This is why I can't stress enough: always swatch colours before you pick what you want! The worst thing to happen is that you pick a colour you THINK you like, only for it to look awful once its on your wall.

Important Things for Picking your Colour:
1) Don't swatch directly on your wall, most samples are flat and unless you're painting your wall a flat colour (instead of eggshell, satin, semi-gloss, etc) it's going to add a weird texture to your wall in that one spot.
2) Look at your swatch in natural lighting AND at night with your room light. This is how I determined that I didn't like any of my colour choices. It looked nice at night, but once it was day time, it wasn't the colour I was looking for.
3) Don't rush the process. You may be eager to paint your room, but don't just rush in picking your colour so quickly. Paint can be pretty expensive so why waste it on a colour you won't like? You're going to have to live with this colour until you move or for the rest of your life, so make the right choice!

Step Two: Cover Your Furniture with Drop Cloths

This is a crucial step especially if you have a lot of spackling to do because then it will require a lot of sanding. If you notice under my bed I actually used bed sheets at first, but of course realized that the dust and stuff flying in the air could probably sift right through the sheets, so this is your best bet in keeping your furniture free from messes. My brother actually got these from the dollar store for $1.50 each which isn't too bad. 

Step Three: Choose your product.

 These are the two choices of putty I had to use. The one on the left was recommended to cover over ripped dry wall but I honestly did not like the formulation at all. You're suppose to use a lightweight spackle to cover those parts of the wall but I felt like it was just too light that it kept falling off my scraper. I ended up using the one on the right for everything, and it worked just fine. It was very wet and worked amazing for my wall.

Step Four: Cover the big holes in your wall.

Yes this is a pretty big hole in my wall. That I kicked in. By accident. hahahahaha. 

My Wall Patch Kit.

You don't need this exact kit to cover big holes in your wall, I just found this one super convenient to use. 

What comes in the kit.

I bought the kit because it had everything I needed to patch up my hole. It came with the aluminum mesh, sandpaper, a plastic scraper, instructions, and the spackle. This spackle goes on pink and dries white, which is awesome.

Step Four A) Put the mesh on your wall

Peel the backing off the mesh and apply it to the hole. If your hole isn't as big as mine, you can always cut the mesh to fit the size. 

Step Four B) Apply the putty.

I applied a lot of putty to ensure that the hole was fully covered and filled and the mesh wasn't showing. 

Getting there. Slowly turning white!

Completely dry! 

Yeah I put on way too much putty. Luckily it was super easy to sand it down. Make sure to feather the edges while applying the putty or else it will leave 3D marks all over your wall. Your goal is to have your putty marks as flat as possible to be flat with the wall.

Step Five: Spackle the rest of your walls.

This is what I mean by my picture collage ruined my wall. I don't know what kind of super tape I used but it ripped up a whole lot of paint right down to the dry wall. 

The result.

As I mentioned above, REMEMBER to feather the edges so it isn't so 3D.

Step Six: Start sanding.

I got this sanding block that came with a handle, but the handle was not helpful at all. 

The result:

Yep, lots of holes to fill and lots of spots to sand. 

Important things to remember:

FEATHER THE EDGES! - I made a horrible mistake by applying too much spackle and not smoothing it flat before letting it dry. It took so much more effort to flatten and sand it down. 

COVER YOUR FURNITURE - This is a must when you're sanding because it gets extremely dusty and gross. The last thing you want to do is clean all your furniture. Its extra work you don't need to be doing.

Stay tuned for the next part of the series!
Check out part one here.

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