Interior House Paint

House Paint: Prepare Room, Move Furniture

Posted by admin
Most of the information I have seen about painting around furniture while working on your interior house painting project tells you to move all of the furniture to the center of the room. This really is not very helpful. Think about a bedroom or living room. If you move all of the furniture to the middle of the room, you have created a huge obstacle to paint around. Even with the proper extension pole for your paint roller, such an obstacle in the center of the room is hard to work around. it is hard to reach over this obstacle to paint the ceiling.
What Interior House Painting Blog recommends is that you move the furniture away from the walls and arrange it with a few pieces in different areas of the room. This makes it easier to work around. Think of a chain of islands spread around the room rather than a huge continent in the center. Just make sure that you leave enough room between islands and walls to place a ladder next to them.
When moving furniture, practice safe lifting.

When moving furniture, take care not to damage it. Smaller light weight pieces of furniture can be picked up and moved. You may have to slide heavier pieces across the floor. Another thing to be very concerned about is the floor. Be careful not to scratch or cut any wooden or tile floors. Also, something that you may not think of is damage to carpet. Pushing or sliding heavy pieces of furniture across carpets can buckle the carpet, creating “hills and valleys” or lumps in carpet. What you need to do to avoid damage to any type of floor is to put large pieces of cardboard under the furniture and slide the furniture across the cardboard, thus protecting the floor. Visit a retail store to ask for some large, empty cardboard boxes and collapse the boxes to have a nice sheet of cardboard to slide the furniture over. Make sure the cardboard is thick enough, and be sure to remove any staples in the cardboard. Doing this at the beginning of your interior house painting project will avoid any damage to your floors.
You must also be very careful with any electrical outlets or switches in the room. You need to turn off the circuit breakers for the outlets in the room you are working on to avoid shock. Latex paint contains a lot of water, and everyone knows that water conducts electricity. Sometimes you may need to turn off more than one breaker for one room. A foolproof way to see if an outlet is off is to use a circuit tester. Inexpensive circuit testers may be purchased at any hardware store. Circuit testers consist of two wires or bars connected to a sealled light. If you plug the circuit tester into any outlet and it lights up, you will know you were not successful in turning off all electricity to the room you want to paint and you will have to to turn off the right breaker, perhaps several. After all of the electricity in the room is off, it is safe to remover the switch plates and outlet covers so as not to get any paint on them. Place all of the screws in a glass and be sure to place it somewhere that it will not be forgotten or knocked over.
You must cover all of your furniture with drop cloths. For this, use plastic sheets that you can buy at any paint or hardware store. Buy the thicker sheets. The thin sheets of plastic are hard to unfold and also tear easily. There are also drop cloths for your interior house painting job that are paper on one side and plastic on the other. These are also ideal for covering floors. You now know the best and the quickest way to set up a room to begin your interior house painting project.