Tips and trick to make painting easy with Dulux

Once you have picked the perfect colours that reflect your personality and style, all you have to do is start painting. This can seem like an intimidating task, but with these simple paint hacks you will find the process easy.

Tips and trick to make painting easy

To be sure of the perfect outcome, even when repainting, always use a base coat. This will completely hide the previous colour, and ensure excellent adhesion for your new coat of paint. This is especially true when painting over solvent-based paint, commonly called gloss or enamel paint.

A tip to picking the right paint is to research. Here at Dulux you get to choose from the various types of paints, for example, Dulux Diamond Fresh which is great for painting spaces like your bedroom. The paint is not just quick to dry, but has virtually no paint odour and even cleanses the air. This means that you can start using your room and new colours again immediately after drying.

When it comes to brushes, we all have those leftover brushes in the store room from the last time we repainted our homes. These brushes might be hard and stiff by the time you decide to repaint your walls. An easy way to overcome this is to dip the brushes overnight in vinegar. Doing this should make the bristles soft again and feel almost brand new without spending a single cent.

Now that your brushes are nice and soft, should you want to pause your painting for the day, a quick solution to avoid the bristles from going hard again would be to wrap them up with a plastic bag and seal with an elastic band when painting is completed.

A well-known tip to avoid painting areas of the wall that you do not wish to paint, including switches or door frames, is to cover them with masking tape. An update to this tip would be instead of using tape, try Vaseline or any household petroleum jelly. Coating the areas you wish to paint with this protects it while you are painting and can easily be removed. The upside to this twist is that when removing the petroleum jelly, you do not have to worry about any tape chipping your coating.

For those adventurous painters who would like to paint without the safety of using tape or petroleum jelly, make sure to use a stiff angle brush. The benefits of this would be that you would not need to remove any petroleum jelly or tape after, but you have to be extra careful. A damp cloth or napkin should always be close by to help with accidental slips, just use it immediately when you are outside of your painting areas before it starts to dry.

It is a common practice when painting a room to cover large furniture with plastic, but what about those items that are fixed to the wall, like the toilet seat or light fixtures? A clever way to protect these items is by covering them with plastic wrap. This everyday kitchen item is easy to manoeuvre and helps cover areas that can be difficult to reach.

Another concern when it comes to repainting a home would be cleaning up after painting and this can be an issue after packing all the small items as well as moving the furniture out of the room. A wonderful trick to help with cleaning is to cover the paint tray with a plastic bag. The plastic bag cover will give the paint tray full functional capability and it will cut the cleaning time by more than half. Once you are done with painting a particular colour or done for the day, just unwrap the plastic bag and throw it away.