Have you ever painted an exterior–it look great–then the next morning there were amber streaks or droplets marring the newly painted surface? As a Bay Area painting contractor, I often encounter  “surfactant leaching”.  Surfactant leaching or exudation occurs when water soluble components exude out of the paint. This happens with all water-based paints, but is more of a visual problem in foggy or dew-prone climates, and can be frustrating to deal with. One can often wipe the residue away immediately with a damp rag, but once dried it can be more difficult to remove.

Because surfactant leaching will generally weather of within a month or so, paint companies will often suggest letting the problem correct itself, but this is a tough one to do when you are banking on immediate visual gratification!

INTERIOR PAINTING TIPS

First, spend some time in choosing the right colors.  You can do this by checking out magazines, friend’s homes, or visiting your local paint store. Once you’ve done this, I recommend buying a sample and putting it up to make sure you’ve got it right. Very often, paint chips look different than the actual product on the wall.

Next, create a staging area in which to place your tools and paint. You can do this using a drop-cloth, or a layer of plastic sheeting taped down with blue tape and covered with a layer of rosin paper (commonly found at paint stores).

If you can, clear out all the furniture and accessories. Take everything off the walls. If you can’t move everything out, place the furniture and lamps in the middle of the room and cover them with a good drop cloth or sheet of plastic. Our preference is a sheet of high density plastic, re-covered by a drop-cloth. You can then cover the edges of the room using 3′ wide rosin paper. Tape the rosin paper down using blue tape, and dispose of it later. I recommend creating “walkways” into and out of the area to be painted, using rosin paper, so as to avoid “tracking” of paint.

Fill small nailholes with lightweight (non-shrink) spackle, and larger holes using a home repair product like “bondo” which sets up in minutes. After sanding major blemishes, be sure to vacuum up the dust and then fill cracks along edges of trim.

One can paint around door knobs or cabinet hinges, but it’s always better to remove all cabinet knobs and hinges, door knobs, light switch plates and outlet covers, and light fixtures. Place the pieces together in separate bags or containers and clearly mark the contents and location (top left cabinet, bathroom door, etc) you took them from.

Rather than using roller trays, We recommend using 5 gallon buckets and 9″ roller grids for walls, and 1 or 2 gallon buckets for trim. in fact, bathrooms can be painted using a two-gallon bucket witha 7″ grid and roller. If your project runs over one day, you can cover these buckets using plastic grocery bags, and wrap your brushes in plastic. (leaving the brush in the bucket causes it to look like a banana).

Avoid using tape

It takes a tremendous amount of time to tape crown moldings, window frames and door frames, and then the results are often unpredictable due to “bleed through”. I recommend masking horizontal surfaces, such as baseboards, window sills and flooring to protect them from spatter, and then use gravity to help you “cut in” ceiling lines and vertical window and door edges. Practice your hand-eye coordination! It will pay off.

We just finished painting a San Francisco, and are very psyched about how the colors worked out. Initially the owner wanted two greens: one for main body and one as an accent; an off-white trim color (accented by a mustard/yellow), and a red, accented by gold.

The colors looked great on the color chart: we chose Ben Moore HC65 as the red, HC122 and HC126 for the greens, “Navajo white”, and “Woven Jaquard”.

The intended body color (HC 122) and the red (hc65) looked great on the fan deck but were too bright on the house, so we literally added a touch of red to the green, and added a touch of green to the red, and it really brought everything into focus. Green and red tend to cancel and mute each other and one can really get some great results playing with the red/green dynamic!

We recently painted a baby’s room in San Ramon. The mother-to-be wanted vertical stripes in alternating shades of pink. We used a snap line to create clean, vertical lines, then applied “Scotch-blue 2080″ tape to the lines. One could also use “Frog Tape” for this purpose, as both brands offer clean paint lines with minimal “bleed through”. After pulling the tape we had minimal touch-ups.

When discussing interior painting jobs, clients often ask me whether they should paint or re-finish the floors first. My advice is generally to re-finish the floors first, then paint afterward. This because sanding of floors invariably creates a ton of dust, which would then be clinging to your newly painted walls. On the other hand, It’s easy enough to cover newly refinished floors before painting.

The one exception for me is when the flooring is a pre-finished engineered or laminate floor, in which case sanding is not an issue.

Of all the problems that can arise in a painting project, poor paint adhesion is perhaps the worst! When new paint fails to stick, it just sucks! Yet as a San Francisco Painting Contractor, I see plenty of interiors with peeling trim paint. The most common cause of this is the application of a water-based paint over a dense, glossy surface (often oil-based). Much R&D has gone into making acrylic paints that stick and level more like their alkyd (oil) counterparts, but I’ve still witnessed poor adhesion when the surface was sanded and chemically de-glossed, and the finish paint used boasted excellent adhesion. I have found that priming works better than de-glossing and sanding, but have also seen the latter work, in conjunction with a paint product that claims excellent adhesion (such as Dunn Edwards “Permasheen”).
My advise: Always test your adhesion before painting everything with paint that doesn’t stick!!

When considering exterior polyurethane products (either clear or pigmented), don’t forget to check out places like West Marine, or online sites like Hamilton Marine. (store.hamiltonmarine.com). Last time we varnished a natural wood exterior in San Francisco, we used “Epiphanes”, and found it to be an excellent product.We purchased ours from West Marine, but also check out the Hamilton Marine website for a wide selection of product, as well as some awesome paint scrapers.

We’ve recently been applying gold leaf on a San Francisco Victorian exterior (15th Street between Church/Dolores), so it seems like a good time to share some tips on how to go about it.

True gold leaf comes in 3-3/8 inch square  books of 25 leaves and in a variety of carats. One can also purchase artificial gold leaf, but…

First off, I choose patent gold leaf, which means that the gold is actually lightly adhered to the  removable tissue pages for easy gilding outdoors. Otherwise, the fragile leaves of (non-patent)gold tend to flutter off and disintegrate in the slightest breeze.

I like 22 karat gold as it’s fairly bright and punchy. In San Francisco, I purchase my leaf at “Sinopia”, and I find them to be very competetively priced, at $45/book.

Before applying the gold, make sure that the surface being leafed is clean and sound. Also keep in mind that even the slightest blemish will show through the gold, so fill and sand to the desired degree. The traditional approach is to prime using a Venetian red, although this is not necessary.

Next, paint on the “sizing”, which acts as a glue for the gold to stick to. Sizing can be oil or water based and  fast or slow-dry. We like an oil-based, slow-drying sizing, as it is smoother than water-based sizing, and more durable for exterior use than the fast-drying products. Slow-dry sizing will dry to a tacky consistancy after about 12 hours, and then will completely dry to a non-sticky consistency after about 16-20 hours. Keep in mind that the gold will stick to the sizing wherever it’s applied, so try to be accurate! We like to paint the sizing at the end of the day, then return the next morning to apply the gold (Alternatively, paint the sizing in the early am, and then apply the gold in the evening).

To apply the gold, We use scissors/razor and a small, soft brush. We then cut the 3-3/8″ sheets into more manageable chunks, to avoid wasting gold. So, for a detail that is 1 or 2″ wide, we can more accurately apply the gold without waste. Then, carefully extract each leaf from the book, place one corner against the pre-sized detail being leafed, then use the brush to paste the leaf against the sizing. The brush allows one to paste the gold more evenly against the sizing than by using  fingertips alone.

Next, carefully peel away the paper backing. The gold should be mostly adhered, but loose bits can be carefully pasted into the surface using the brush. There will still be some missing spots in the gold finish, which can be then filled in with left-over bits of leaf.

Apply a second layer of sizing and gold to solidify the finish and cover any cracks/gaps left from the first layer. Then, carefully burnish the finished product using a clean, soft cloth if desired, and voila! You’re done.

True gold leaf should outlast the adjacent painted finishes and so it does not require clear-coating like artificial leaf or painted gold.

I was talking to a potential client and they told me about a San Francisco restoration artist who’s created a line of ornamental plaster (cartouches, scrolls, onlays, medallions..) They will be using one of her Cartouches on the front of their San Francisco home. Her name is Lorna Kollmeyer. She’s got a great website! Check out lornakollmeyer.com

An interesting thing about the new Glidden Stores. Over a decade ago, Several US paint brands (Fuller O’Brien, Sinclair, and Glidden among them) were bought out by the international giant ICI (Imperial Chemical industries). Former Fuller Obrien/Sinclair locations were converted into ICI/Dulux stores. Dulux is an internationally available brand of paint, produced by AkzoNobel (formerly Imperial Chemical Industries). The brand name Dulux has been used by both ICI and DuPont since 1931 and was one of the first alkyd-based paints.

I’ve always liked the ICI/Dulux line, because they have large resources, big r&d dollars, and many product choices from which to cherry-pick a great line of paints.

Funny thing is; after over 10 years, Americans still don’t recognize the ICI name brand, and so they’ve changed the name back to Glidden, for that warm, familiar name recognition (or so I heard: Perhaps AkzoNobel just wants to distance themselves from their old moniker). In any case, be aware that when you buy Glidden, it is backed by a longstanding, international company with great r&d and the resources to put out a truly solid, dependable product line. Check out their web-site!