Nothing is more frustrating than a failed paint job – especially if it fails right after it is applied. Luckily, the most common reasons for premature paint failure are well-known, and can be prevented. Here, Blue Door Painters lists the top five reasons for paint failure, and what can be done to prevent them.
1. Inadequate preparation. A surface needs to be thoroughly stripped of loose material, scraped, sanded, caulked, cleaned, and primed prior to application of a new coat of paint, or that paint does not have good odds of staying successfully adhered to the surface. Blue Door Painters follows a strict regimen of surface preparation before all of our jobs in order to prevent this form of failure.
2. Bad weather. The weather cannot be too cold or too wet while paint is drying and curing, or the film will not form adequately. For this reason, Blue Door Painters pays close attention to the weather when scheduling exterior jobs. Ideally, conditions should be warm and dry for 24 hours following a new paint job.
3. Cheap paint. While you don’t necessarily need to buy the premiere designer paints, the extremely cheap paints contain a surplus of useless filler components, and are not built to last. Blue Door Painters recommends purchasing a good, solid, tried-and-true brand of paint like Duron or Sherwin-Williams.
4. Improper priming. While some brands of paint claim that their products can be used without a primer, in our experience painting most surfaces without a primer is a recipe for coating failure. A prime coat is specially designed to adhere to the substrate – and should be selected to adhere to the specific substrate you are dealing with. It takes a different kind of paint to adhere well to metal, wood, drywall, old paint, masonry, etc. – and this is the specific purpose of your primer. In Blue Door Painters opinion, this is not a step that shoudl be skipped.
5. Hasty Application. Failing to wait for full drying and curing between coats, laziness in prepping the surface, and hasty application of paint leaving gaps in the continuous film are all leading causes of paint failure. Painting a wall may seem simple, but it really does need to be done right. Which is why Blue Door Painters staff are all held to the highest possible standards of craftsmanship, so that we produce a paint job that we can stand behind.