A paint job is only as good as the preparation that goes into it.
If there were a stone onto which the ten commandments of painting were carved, that one would be right at the top, all in capital letters.
In order for a paint job to work correctly, it has to stick to the surface it is meant to coat. That paint does stick to the surface is something that most people take for granted, but it is actually the result of years of clever engineering. Paint is a liquid, which, when spread across a vertical surface (or even applied to a ceiling, directly in opposition to gravity), rather than running down and collecting on the floor, stays adhered in a thin film where it is applied, forming a solid coating. Only a mixture with just the right viscosity and chemical composition can manage this feat that we take so much for granted.
And that is when the surface to which it is being applied is a continuous solid. What happens when you put a new coat of paint on top of a surface covered in loose material – dirt, grease, chipping or peeling remnants of an old paint or wallpapering job? Well, the new paint attempts to do what it was engineered to do – form a strong, continuous film. The problem is, when you form a continuous film over a discontinuous surface, tension gets added to the loose particles, and they tend to loosen further, pulling away from the rest of the surface. The film of paint covering therefore starts to get torn in different directions and pull away from its close adhesion to the rest of the surface, causing all sorts of problems. Take a wall with chipping paint, for example. If you paint over it, as the new paint dries, it contracts and adheres to the whole surface, including the flakes of loose paint. By contracting, it pulls some of those loose flakes off the wall. This may form cracks in the film between the paint adhered to the loose chip and the paint adhered to the rest of the wall. It also creates a void behind the film, in which moisture and mildew can collect, leading to the steady erosion of the film.
What is the solution to this problem? Extremely careful preparation of the surface before a new paint job is administered. Blue Door Painters follows a strict preparation regimen of stripping, sanding, scraping, caulking, replacing failing drywall and plaster, and thorough cleaning before administering any new coatings to a substrate. That way, we ensure that we have put up a coating that was truly prepared to last.