Before we could paint the house, we had to clean up all of the dust from the drywall.
Drywall dust is very fine and coats everything, walls, floors, ceilings, etc., so you
have to wipe down all of the walls and ceilings and then try to get all of the dust off
of the floor without getting it back onto the ceilings and walls. Our neighbor came up
with a wonderful invention that was just what we needed. He had an old industrial box fan
that he hooked a 3" hose up to the intake side of the fan and then a 4" hose to the
output side of the fan which we then stuck outside the house through a window. This
created a giant vaccum cleaner that would suck up all of dust and then send it out the
hose to the outside. This worked great for most of the dust, however, there was still a
lot of dust in the cracks of the floor that would puff up when you walked across a room
that we did not want getting into the paint, so we got down on our hands and knees and
started scrubbing with wire brushes. Get a good pair of knee pads as you will get sore
very quickly if you don't. It took us three days to scrub the entire house and just
finshed a few hours before everyone was scheduled to come over and start painting.
Because the house was empty (i.e-no carpet, furniture, cabinets, etc. There wasn't much to
cover before we could start painting, we had to cover things like tubs and showers. We
did not cover the windows as we were planning to use rollers instead of paint sprayers for
the walls, so we were not concerned about the overspray.
Drywall is actually a very pourous material and will suck up paint very quickly. You will
have a much nicer finish if you first apply a coat of primer to all of the walls
before you apply the first coat of paint. With the primer, we used 12" wide rollers and
didn't care whether we got the primer on the ceilings or if we went all the way into
the corners and painted the wall that we were not currently painting, so we did not edge
any of the corners (more on this later). Priming the walls went very quickly and we finshed
the entire house by early afternoon.
Here is our son and our friend's son applying the primer
When you paint a room, generally you want to edge all of the corners so that the rollers
don't get paint on the ceilings or that you don't get too much paint in the corners. What
you do when you edge is to take either a brush or a flat "edger" and paint a 2-4" wide
strip of paint on the wall you are currently painting so that when you paint with the roller,
you only have to paint up to the strip of paint. This keeps paint off of the ceiling and
keeps the corners nice and free of paint runs.
Here is a room that has been "edged"
We had about three people start edging as soon as the primer was dry in the first rooms
we had primed so they would be ready to paint as soon as the people applying the primer
where done. Edging takes about twice as long as rolling, so schedule in your time
accordingly. Watch as you paint to make sure you don't have any paint runs as they are
harder to get rid of later when the paint drys than they are when they are wet. It took
us about a 1- 1/2 days to edge and paint the entire house with the first coat of color.
In order to eliminate confusion with our help over which room to paint which color, we
painted the entire house the same color. This also saved time and will allow us to move
in and live in the house for a while before we decide what we want to do with each room.
Here we are with some of our friends painting different rooms
The last part of the house to be painted was the ceiling. One of our friends is a painter
so he volunteered to come over and bring his sprayer. I highly recommend spraying your
ceiling if you can do this as you get a very nice finish and it doesn't take half the time
that rolling does. You do use more paint by spraying then you do rolling, so add some
extra gallons to your figures when you are calculating how much paint you will use. Other
than a little overspray on the window sills, there was nothing that had to be wiped off of
the walls or the floor. It took our friend one afternoon to paint all of the ceilings in
the entire house.
Here is our friend spray painting the ceilings