Exterior home painting can totally transform the look and value of your home almost instantly. If you’re planning to sell your home, a few cans of paint can increase its value and help you sell your home faster than you expected. But you must be wondering, should you hire a professional painter or go DIY?
The answer to that depends on a number of factors. For instance, do you have any painting experience? How big is your home? If you choose to paint your own home, you might just save yourself some money on labor, or run the risk of making a huge colorless mess. To make the right decision, consider these three things:
- What is Your Painting Experience?
Painting looks simple enough, even fun in movies, but it’s not as effortless as they make it look. Painting the exterior of your house is a major project that requires the right training and sufficient experience. So if you’ve never painted a room or a piece of furniture before, you will find painting the entire exterior of your home an overwhelming task.
Professional painting contractors have the right training, experience, skills, and tricks to ace a residential painting project and produce a high-quality finish. Painting it tight spaces, near the ceiling and multi-story walls may seem impossible to a novice, but this is what pros do routinely. If you’re in doubt of your painting skills and experience in any way, you should probably leave the project to the pros to avoid making a mess. - Do You Have the Right Tools?
When house painting is mentioned, what comes to the minds of novice and first-time painters is a paintbrush and a couple of paint cans. Unfortunately, exterior painting is not just about changing the color on your walls, there is a lot that needs to happen before you even open that paint can.
From surface preparation, repairs, and tapping off obstacles, to applying the primer and paint, you will need things like an electric sander, pressure washer, paint scrapping tool, caulking gun, paint brushes, rollers, ladders, scaffolding, painters’ tape, and so on. If you don’t have access to such tools, buying or even renting them can be quite cost-prohibitive.
Professional painters have invested in all these tools because this is what they do for a living –and it’s a major contribution to the final high-quality results they get at the end of the project. So if the idea of acquiring the above tools and supplies, whichever way, makes you freeze, you should consider hiring a professional painting contractor. - Scale and Condition of Your Project
Most exterior painting jobs are typically massive and require a lot of labor and other resources. However, if you have particularly large house whose walls have damages, cracks, holes, stains, mold/mildew, and extensively failing paint film, your exterior painting project is clearly cut out for a professional painting contractor.
Extensively damaged walls will need repairs and a great deal of prep work including power washing, sanding, paint stripping, caulking, priming and so on. A professional painting company will adjust the number of crew members and allocate appropriate resources depending on the size of your home and the conditions of the wall. If you take the DIY route, chances are it will just be a one-man/woman show with a couple of untrained helping hands.
Bottom Line
While DIY house painting is a viable option for homeowners looking to save some money on the project, it might not be the best approach if you don’t have the skills, training, experience, and tools to match the task at hand. DIY might only be the best option when handling small projects like a couple of furniture pieces.
Having said that, if you need any professional painting assistance re-painting the exterior or interior of your home, Eason painting can help. We’re currently serving the areas of Macomb Township, Washington Township, Ray Township, Rochester, Rochester Hills, Romeo, Armada, Troy, Shelby Township, Harrison Township, Chesterfield, and Clinton Township, MI. Give us a call today for a free quote and more details.