Painting houses doesn’t have to be just a menial task. Every person who’s done it right knows you could easily call it an art form. Every painter needs some essential equipment to create worlds on canvas’ – brushes, palettes, canvas, paint and easel. In a similar vein, a serious and responsible house painter can easily be recognized by their tools of the trade. If you plan to start painting houses, here’s an expert’s choice of house painting equipment.
Brushes and rollers
These two come in tandem and they are the most important and basic tools of any painter. You can buy them at almost any hardware store, and there’s the upside in the ubiquity of these items. There are so many designs and types you’ll likely find the one that suits you perfectly as a house painter. If you plan to go around painting people’s houses, don’t leave your home without these two.
Paint products
Stucco, plaster, caulking, primer, latex paint, acrylic paint – these are only some of the basic terms (and materials) you’ll use for your paint jobs. You’ll have to learn what the best type of interior or exterior paint is and learn how to apply it best. Primer is the undercoat, or preparatory painting you put on before adding the layer of paint the customer wants. Going into further detail about the paints and materials is nigh impossible since labels and standards differ based on the country, not to mention the fact that the way paint behaves varies based on climate and season. You’ll just have to learn this through experience.
Paint sprayer
The essential and inescapable tool for any self-respecting painter in the twenty-first century, the paint sprayer or the spray paint gun is the life saver for exterior painting projects. By its very design, it will help you do all the necessary work efficiently, quickly and with some very nice results. Now, on the one hand, it’s not a cheap piece of equipment, costing somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000, but considering the amount of time you’ll save per project (which means – more projects on daily basis) you will return the investment in no time.
Elevation equipment
Those pesky ceiling corners are downright impossible to reach without climbing atop something. Now, we all know the most important factor here is to ensure we are standing on something solid. There’s nothing more stable than solid aluminum mobile scaffolding that you can modify and move around with ease. Regular ladder or even platform ladders can hardly be reassuring when you need to spend a lot of time painting your ceiling. Step stools are a good solution for low-ceiling areas but they’re not really helpful in most regular rooms.
Pressure washing machine
More often than not, when you are hired to do a solid paint job, there is a step that goes before putting on the primer. If you are hired to paint the exterior of the house, layers of dust and dirt can create a “relief” that needs to be washed first. After all, this wall topography tends to fall off if you try to paint over it. This is why you need the pressure washer – the essential tool that will clean all the dirt off before you proceed to paint exterior surfaces. Interiors usually don’t require the use of this device, but some things, like cigarette smoke, cannot be cleaned any other way and you can’t reach the ceiling to scrub it off anyway.
Having tools doesn’t mean a lot if you don’t have the skill to wield them. The array of skills you need to do this job right is not particularly diverse or numerous, but in order to master them, you’ll need to put in a lot of effort. In the end, perseverance always beats talent.
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