Week 4: How to prep walls for paint

Last week at the rental house I mostly worked at cleaning up the house, getting more junk out of there, cleaning the walls, and patching holes all in order to prep the walls for paint. I didn’t get everything ready for paint, but here are the steps I use to get my walls ready for painting. I plan to paint in about two weeks, so have a bit more time to prepare. You can see the timeline for our reno project at the very end of this post.

1. Clean the walls

Before starting any painting, I want to make sure the walls are clean. There were a few rooms in our rental house that had some surface mold on the walls, especially in the bedroom closets and in the laundry room. I washed down these areas with bleach to kill all the mold and make sure that it doesn’t come back.

I also finished removing the wallpaper from the bedroom. When you remove wallpaper you want to make extra sure that the walls are clean before you paint. I washed the walls using TSP to make sure there was no wallpaper residue left on the walls.

2. Fill holes with spackle

Next remove all nails and screws from the walls. Using a wall scraper, make sure that the hole is flat. Then fill the holes with a little bit of drywall spackle.

3. Sand the spackle

Once the drywall compound is dry, sand it flat using a sanding sponge. I didn’t actually get this far last week, I got as far as filling the holes in the two bedrooms, and the laundry room before I ran out of time. My plan is to finish painting the bedrooms, bathroom and laundry room before moving onto the rest of the house.

4. Prime the patched areas of the walls

If you’re not going to do a paint and primer in one for your wall paint, it’s a good idea to prime all the wall patches. The drywall compound soaks up paint and you might see the areas that you patched after you paint all the walls.

5. Sand the entire wall

Finally, the last step to prep your walls for paint is to sand the walls. I use a drywall sander on a paint stick and just lightly sand the entire wall. This gets rid of any bumps or dust that was on the wall the last time it was painted. Then using a damp cloth get rid of any dust on the walls. And that’s how to prep walls for paint!

OTHER THINGS WE DID LAST WEEK…

Remove kitchen cabinets

Tony and I were able to go to the house together one day this week, so we were able to get all the kitchen cabinets out. The upper cabinets were built all together as two units, and there was no way I’d be able to get those out by myself. Even with the two of us it was still pretty tricky. The kitchen looks much bigger now and smells just a little bit better too. Clearly there’s a lot of work left to do in the kitchen

Start working on curb appeal

I took off the shutters and the front screen door and brought them home to paint. I’m not totally sure what to do with the front of the house. It’s not really in our budget to do too much on the exterior, but I would love to upgrade the walkway somehow.

Next week

Next week an electrician will be coming to the house to do a lot of work. The panel box is an old fuse box and the wiring is all outdated. But since the electrician will probably make holes in the walls, I’m going to wait on painting until he’s done and I can patch the walls again. I also ordered the flooring and I hope to get started on that this weekend!

Reno Timeline

• Week 1 – Demolition
• Week 2 – Laundry room plumbing
• Week 3 – Wall removal
• Week 4 – Prep for painting
• Week 5 – Electrical and flooring
• Week 6 – Paint
• Week 7 – Trim
• Week 8 – Exterior
• Week 9 – Kitchen and bathroom