Brush Up With Tips From the Pros

There is nothing more important to a house than the paint that covers it, inside and out. A couple of hundred dollars' worth of paint can instantly redefine the way it looks, produce a quickie makeover and take a home from suburban-tract tedium to country-cottage romance.

The trick is getting that paint on the walls in a reasonably expert fashion. There are generally two ways to go here. Hire a team of pros and be prepared to spend several thousand dollars -- oh, yeah, and be prepared to spend that much every three or four years. Or you can do the job yourself. You control the schedule, get the work done when you want it done, and avoid having a group of strangers drift in and out of your life for what may be several weeks. And you'll save thousands.

Herein lies the dilemma. You know there's a reason that good painters earn good money. There is usually a noticeable difference between the job they do and the job the average homeowner can achieve. But you can close the gap considerably and end up with an almost professional-looking paint job by using a few of the tricks the pros use to make their work look so good. Here is a healthy sampling of what the master painters know:

Start with good paint. As the old saw goes, "There is nothing more expensive than a can of cheap paint." Discount paints tend to be filled with, well, fillers, which add nothing to the quality of your paint job and often require you to buy more paint to achieve an acceptable outcome. Spending $10, $20 or even $30 extra per gallon almost always delivers better results and a longer-lasting paint job.

Test colors. Buy quarts of the colors you are considering and paint a patch of wall with each. Then observe them in all kinds of light -- especially natural light -- over a couple of days. Do this with curtains, chairs, lamps, paintings, etc., in place to see how the colors work with your decorative mix. (Some super-fussy pros will test only gallons of paint; they claim that because custom-color mixes are formulated for gallons, a quart won't show the true color of the paint. Needless to say, this would add significantly to the cost of your paint job.)

"Box" your paint. If you are using a custom-color paint -- one that has been mixed for you at the paint store rather than picked right off the shelf -- it is a good idea to cross-mix, or "box" your paint cans, to ensure that the color is consistent throughout the paint job. Boxing simply involves pouring all of a room's paint color into a five-gallon bucket (available at any paint outlet), mixing well, and then returning it to individual paint cans for ease of handling. In theory, this blends any tiny discrepancies between individual gallons into a single, consistent tint.

Add thinner in small increments. If you plan to thin your paint, do it gradually. Once you have added too much thinner, you won't be able to take it out. Again, to ensure consistency, you should thin paint in multi-gallon batches; that is, thin enough at one time to do an entire room or an entire job. Do the same when mixing in paint additives such as Penetrol (for oil paint) or Floetrol (for latex), which are used to enhance the flowing characteristics of paint.