Amateur house painters never had as much help as today. Scores of new paints and equipment placed on the market in the last few years make it possible for the weekend handyman to paint his own house almost as easily as a professional. From one-coat paints to disposable blowtorches, everything has been designed to make the job go faster, look better and cost less.

With the new outside rollers, you can paint an average-size house in a couple of days. Add an extension handle and you can roll a terrace without stooping down, reach a roof without leaving the ground.

Painting Hard Spots

Specialized aids with built-in know, how tackle the hard spots for you.

Better still, you don’t have to spend hours getting ready and hours cleaning up afterward. Premixed paints, electric-drill attachments and self-dispensing calking guns make short work of preparation. Cleaning up is a soap-and-water job for the rubber paints, or a quick dip in special cleaners for the oils. Disposable dropcloths and paper paint pails are used once and thrown away.

In this section are some tips on techniques and tools that make it easier to paint your house than ever before – not the way the “pro” does, perhaps, but with much the same results.

The term paint is used to include paints, varnishes, enamels, shellacs, lacquers, and stains.

• Paints are composed of mineral pigments, organic vehicles, and a variety of thinners all combined.
• Varnishes are resins dissolved in organic thinners.
• Enamels are pigmented varnishes.
• Shellac is lac gum dissolved in alcohol.
• Lacquers may be both pigmented or clear – the liquid portion usually is treated nitrocellulose dissolve in thinners.
• Stains may be pigmented oil or a penetrating type.

Many of these materials, such as paints, varnishes, and lacquers, are formulated for specific purposes:

• Outside house paints and exterior varnishes are intended to give good service when exposed to weathering
• Interior wall paints are formulated to give excellent coverage and good wash-ability.
• Floor enamels are made to withstand abrasion.
• Lacquers are formulated for rapid drying.
• There are also formulas which provide extra self-cleaning, fume- resisting, waterproofing, hardening, flexibility, mildew-resisting, resistance to fading, and breathing qualities.

Interior paints are used to obtain pleasing decorative effects, improve sanitary conditions, and insure better lighting. These paints may be divided into four types: wall primers; one-coat flats; flat, semigloss, and gloss; and water paints.

Wall primers or primer-sealers are intended to be applied directly to bare plaster, wallboard, and similar porous surfaces to provide a uniform, sealed surface for subsequent coats of paint. A typical wall primer may be made from varnish or bodied-oil vehicle and hiding pigments. It is intended to penetrate only slightly into porous surfaces.

The primers are best applied with a wide wall brush.

One-coat flat paints are organic-solvent-thinned paints intended to accomplish priming, sealing, and finish coating in one operation. They are often sold in thin paste form so that additional inexpensive thinner may be added and mixed before application to increase the volume of paint by one-fourth or more.

Flat, semigloss, and gloss interior paints and enamels vary in degree of gloss, hiding power, and other properties. Paints giving the best hiding power are normally paints of lowest gloss, although some modern high-gloss enamels also have good hiding power.

Water-thinned interior paints are calcimine, casein, resin-emulsion, and gloss water paints. Calcimine consists of powdered whiting and clay mixed with an animal-glue binder and a preservative. It cannot be recoated, but can be easily washed off before redecorating.

It is not necessary to remove casein before recoating but, if de-sired, it can be softened by washing with hot solutions of trisodium phosphate. Resin-emulsion paints, marketed in paste form, are to be thinned with water and, when properly made and applied, adhere well to plaster and provide a good decorative medium. They need not be removed before redecorating, provided the film is in sound condition. This is also true of gloss water paints.