Rising Paint Prices Make This the Best Time to Paint

Paint prices are on the rise. While this will affect petroleum-based paints more than the new green paints, the coat of titanium dioxide has increased bu half and is expected to continue rising 10% a year for the next few years, according to TZ Minerals International. Titanium dioxide is an important ingredient in high-quality paints.

Overall, the price of house paint has increased by as much as 16% compared with 2009 prices, and prices are expected to continue to rise.

What should you do about this? Simple. Have your home or office painted now, before prices increase further. Wages are increasing in Australia, too, so waiting to have your painting done will only cost you more when you get around to it.

The temperature right now is perfect, prices are as low as they will be in the foreseeable future, and it's just the right time to have your painting and decorating done to make your home look its best for the stay-at-home season. Call Courtney & Wise if you're in Sydney or the Norther Beaches, at 9958 1099. If not, consult the Master Painters Association  to find a qualified painter in your area.

House Painting Costs: Doing the Math

As much as 80% of the job of painting your house is preparation. Scaffolding, protecting the area around the house from paint, preparing the surfaces, and priming the walls are all time-consuming jobs that must be done meticulously for the best results.

The painting itself is the next largest investment. Painters must cut in some areas with a brush before painting large surfaces, they must paint the large surfaces, and then do the finish work with a brush. Taking this time will give you a good-looking, long-lasting job that will increase the value of your home.

There's also time involved in cleaning up and disposing of any waste correctly.

The cost of having your house professionally painted is, as you can see, mostly about the labor, not the paint. So is the cost of doing it yourself, in fact. Your time has value, and it will take you longer than it will take a trade painter.

Because of this, it doesn't make sense to skimp on the paint you choose. A poor quality paint won't last as long as a top quality paint, so the job will have to be done again sooner.

In fact, the best quality paints can last more than twice as long as poor quality paints. If the surfaces are properly prepared and a top quality paint is used correctly, an exterior painting job can look good and protect your home for ten years. A poor quality paint may need repainting in as little as four years. Even if the better paint costs twice as much as the poorer one, the labor costs and paint costs together mean that using the better paint costs half as much over the long run as using the bargain brand. That's no bargain.

At Courtney & Wise, we use first quality Australian paints like Murobond, Dulux, and Wattyl. They're more environmentally sound, and more economical in the long run. When you hire a painter, make sure that the materials to be used are spelled out in the contract, and make sure that the paint used is top quality.

Exterior Painting: White Buildings

White is a popular choice for exteriors. The look is clean and fresh, there are energy-saving benefits to a light colour choice, and white trim works well with most building materials.

There's more to the choice than meets the eye, though.

True white, like office paper, looks harsh. The key to success with a white building is to choose a toned white: white with a bit of brown, grey, or another colour in it.

If you're using white for trim, choose a shade that tones with the other colours or materials used in the building. In the picture here, a slightly greyed white looks bright and fresh against darker shades of grey. A slight biscuit shade to white looks well with natural wood. With brick, consider a slight pink cast to the white.  All of these shades will look white, without a chalky effect.

For assistance with colour choices, consult a professional painter.

Painting Doors

Doors are overlooked in the typical house painting job. That's a mistake. The door is the first thing you see when you approach a room, and the last thing you see when you leave it. Doors are likely to be what you see most of when you walk through a house or office building, in the hall, or glimpsed from the room you're visiting.

They should be as much a part of your decorating plan as the walls. 

One approach to doors is to paint them all alike, even if the rooms of the house are painted or papered quite differently. Stained wood or fresh white paint can give a uniformity to the doors of a home that serves as punctuation for the look of your house.

Another option is to use the doors to make individual statements. A hallway filled with doors of different, harmonizing colours can have a saucy look. Use stencils or vinyl wall stickers to add the names of the occupants, or have a professional add nameplates to the doors for timeless elegance. 

Contrasting colours on doors can give a dramatic look. A door gets more handling, scuffing, and random abuse than any other part of the room, so your door may need repainting more often than your walls. Take advantage of this to update the overall look of the room with a trendy colour, and you'll have a less pricey version of the focal wall idea.

Doors also lend themselves to fancy finishes. Outlining the panels of the door with contrasting or toning colours, adding a pattern, or even using a trompe l'oeil effect can spice up the whole room.

To paint your own doors, you should remove the door from the frame, remove all hardware, paint the door with a brush or spray, and rehang it when it's completely dry. It's possible to paint a door while it's still in place, but you'll need a steady hand and good quality brushes. Be sure, if you choose to paint a door while it's still in place, that you mask the hinges and other hardware.

House Painting in Sydney

If you live in Sydney, or in surrounding areas like Mosman and Cremorne, you should consider calling Courtney & Wise   about your house painting needs.

Painting your house is one of the easiest and most economical ways to improve your quality of life. This is the home improvement project that gives the best return on investment -- you can expect to get back very nearly the full amount of the cost of painting your house when you sell your home.

If you're not selling your home, then you can enjoy the fresh new look yourself.

Autumn is the perfect time to paint, with temperatures and humidity in the right range for smooth and even drying. Fall is ideal for both exterior and interior painting.

And Courtney & Wise are the right painters and decorators, too. We're Master Painters and have been painting the homes and businesses of Sydney and the Northern Beaches for two generations. Call us at 9958 1099 to schedule your painting and decorating job.

Line of Sight

Before you plan a painting job, interior or exterior, you must identify the lines of sight in the space you're painting. In the conitext of decorating, this simply means that you need to be aware of what you can see from all the areas in the room or space you're working with, and also of the other parts of your property from which the room or space can in turn be seen.

That is, when you're in the cheery blue and yellow kitchen, you may have a view into the dining room. If so, your pale teal and oxblood colour scheme might be a bit of a visual shock. And of course vice versa.

This makes a difference for effective painting and decorating, but it's often overlooked. It's not hard to do, though. Begin with a plan of the room or space you'e working with. Mark it out with a grid. Go into the room and walk through all the areas of the grid, looking around as you go. Use arrows to identify the things outside the space that will be visible to people within it.

Then move outside the space into the surrounding areas and use arrows to mark the locations from which the space can be seen, and what parts can be seen.

For example, one wall of a room may not actually be visible from any neighboring rooms. In that case, it could be painted as a focal wall in a colour that won't be harmonious with neighboring rooms, as long as there is a visual transition for people entering the room.

While in homes and offices it's most common to use this information in order to arrange for a pleasant coordination from one space to the next, that isn't always the goal.

Sometimes you want a surprise. Stepping around a corner of a building and finding a walled garden or a courtyard can be very pleasant and very effective from a decorating standpoint. Knowing the locations from which the feature can be seen ahead of time makes it easier to plan the surprise.

When Reality Sets In

When you read tips and hints and even complete directions on how to paint your house, even in this blog, you face a problem: all the things you read are based on an abstraction.

It's like instructions for roasting a chicken, which work perfectly for a spherical bird, and not so perfectly for a bird-shaped one.

When you're painting, you tape the edges of the wall, paint, and lift off the tape to find that, since the wall was not precisely flat, a little bit of paint has seeped under the tape and given you something less than the clear, sharp line you were imagining.

Or you pull off that tape and find that, since some of the paint dried before the tape was removed and some did not, there's a clear difference between the two parts.

Or, to leave the tape issue for a moment, you carefully cover your furniture with tarps, paint, and then pull off the tarps, at which point paint and dirt from the tarps drip onto your furniture.

Professional painters don't struggle with these problems, because their experience allows them to foresee these things and adjust for them without even giving it extra thought. You should probably give them some thought.

Here are some things you might want to think about:

• Gravity should be taken into account on all paint jobs. Paint, dust, tools, people on ladders -- all are affected by gravity.
• Imperfections are, by their nature, different from one circumstance to the next and hard to predict. You just have to watch for them and adjust to them.
• The shape of an object and the materials from which an object is made will affect their interactions with other objects. This makes a difference to things like how much wall you can cover with one litre of paint and how well the tape adhered to the wall.

In short, don't expect to be exempt from the physics of the universe when you paint.

Inspiration for Colour

Inspiration can come from many sources: the painting or vase that you love, a holiday snap, the scene from your window. Pull out the colours and use them throughout your home -- right?

Not necessarily. While pulling the colours from an inspiration piece is a time-honoured way to get your colour scheme set, it isn't always as simple as that.

Take the sweetly blushing apples here. You may love the look in the bowl, but will you really want red and yellow walls?

Go deeper. What you love about the combination may be something different:

• Temperature. The warm colours may be what you love here. The antique golds that so many decorators are using as neutrals will give you just that warmth. Combine them with shades of honey, warm pink, or yellow green to get the warmth of this fruit bowl.
• Contrast. Sometimes it's more the level of contrast that you love: the bright pop of the colourful apples agains the white of the bowl, for example, or the complex harmonies among the multiple shades of yelllow, red, and green.
• Emotion. Maybe it's less the specific colours than the cheerfulness of the look. If it makes you think of sun-dappled orchards in autumn, you may crave the feeling of that scene more than the specific colours themselves.

Get samples of the colours in the piece that inspired you, be it a bowl of fruit or a rug, but don't hesitate to branch out in other directions.

Paint and Your Heritage Home

When it's time to paint your heritage home, you may be thinking primarily in terms of  choosing the right colours for the job. Read our posts on heritage colours for help with that.

But there are additional issues you may not have thought about yet, and sometimes those issues are equally important.Think not just about the colours, but also about the paint.

First, you have to think about your current paint. Does your heritage home have heritage paint, either on the surface or under layers of more recent paint? If so, you may need to be concerned about lead paint. The health issues are serious enough that you should not consider dealing with this yourself, and should in fact only work with a painter who is certified for handling lead paint.

If your heritage home has modern paint, then you may have petrochemical paint on the walls. These paints are generally not breathable, which in an older home often means that they have moisture built up behind the paint. Cleaning them off and preparing the surface can be a serious mess. You may even find damage from the moisture hiding under the paint. Ignoring it and slapping on another coat of paint just leads to more problems down the road.

Once the surfaces are prepared, you need to think about the kind of paint you should use to get the look of your home's time period, to suit your home's construction, and to work with your modern lifestyle -- all at the same time.

It's worth dealing with a professional. The investment you make in the right paint for your heritage building will reward you handsomely over the years.

Courtney & Wise are award-winning Master Painters who specialize in heritage homes. If your home is in Sydney or the Northern Beaches, contact us at 9958 1099.

What's in Your Paint?

We've just seen a traditional recipe for distemper (not the disease, but the wall covering) made from pigment powder, whiting (not the fish, but a powdered chalk), and rabbit glue.

This type of paint is still sometimes used on canvas by artists, but there are better options for your walls.
Beginning in the 20th century, house paints generally contained petrochemical solvents: that is, chemicals made from petroleum that kept the pigments together. These were cheaper than the traditional glue-based paints, but they had their own problems.

For one thing, these paints released a lot of VOCs, volatile organic compounds. You know how fresh paint smells, but you may not realize that paint continues to emit VOCs into the atmosphere for years, with negative effects on the environment. Add the environmental costs of producing the petrochemicals for use in paint, and you end up with a completely unsustainable product.

Now, water-based paints with low or no VOCs are available. The first generation of these more eco-friendly paint had lower performance and fewer colours, but that is no longer the case. Companies like Dulux make beautiful eco-friendly paints.

Petro-chemical based paints also have problems from the standpoint of breathability. You may not think of your walls as needing to breathe, but heritage homes often do need moisture exchange with the air. Their more porous surfaces, when painted with petrochemical paints, essentially receive a plastic coating. Moisture can build up under the paint and lead to bubbling, blistering, and other kinds of paint failure.

Pigments can be made from natural minerals, including titanium dioxide or chalk (and, in the past, lead). There are also synthetic pigments, though many of these create a lifeless look in the colour of the paint. The pigments that produce the colour on your walls are generally extended with other minerals that effect the performance of the paint.