My husband and I purchased an old house that was built in the late 1960’s and while the home has a lot of charm, we have had to totally gut the home, remodel it and paint it to bring it into the 21st century.
While we looked at hiring Painters, we decided to just do our house painting ourselves and today, I wanted to share some painting tips with all of you on what we learned.
Exterior House Shutters: If your house already has window shutters and they are in good shape, you can definitely repaint them all by yourself! We repainted all 22 window shutters in less than one day. The easiest way to paint them is to purchase exterior house spray paint in the color that you desire. You want paint that is made for outdoors use and it should have a color + primer built into it.
We found that one can did four shutters and we only needed to spray on one coat. A good rule of thumb to follow is to paint your shutters the same color as they were before or go ONLY one shade darker. They will need to be sprayed outside on a warm sunny day and within a couple of hours they are ready to be hung up.
Exterior Porch Columns: We have 3 porches connected to our home and 2 of them are out front and 1 of them is out back. All 3 of these porches have wooden columns holding them up. Over the years, those columns got weather damage and the paint was peeling and chipping off. They looked terrible since the previous home owners left them go.
We purchased some exterior house paint (white) that had the primer mixed in with it. We then took an electric palm sander and sanded off all of that old chipped and peeling paint and sanded them until we were down to the bare wood. We then used paint brushes and the white exterior paint and repainted all of our wooden porch columns. Once they were dry, my husband painted a clear coat exterior sealer over the top to protect the paint and wood underneath. This took us an entire weekend to complete, but we are pretty happy about it.
Next week I will blog some more DIY house painting tips that hubby and I have been learning! This coming weekend we are going to tackle repainting our exterior wrought iron banisters and our wrought iron lamp post. I am actually starting to enjoy all of this house remodeling we have been doing!
I didn’t realize that you could do 4 shutters with one spray can. I wish you had photos of the columns before and after. I am sure that you and your husband did a great job.