The Easy Way to Paint a House

The easy way to paint a house is by using a paint sprayer. But painting a house also involves some prep work to make the job go smoothly and to get the best results.

Steph and Vicki Kubiak of Mother Daughter Projects used a paint sprayer to paint Steph’s house. Here they walk you through all the steps involved.

The Easy Way to Paint a House

Deciding to paint a house can be a matter of need, to add curb appeal, or a matter of color preference. For Steph, it was color. Ever since she moved into her home, she has wanted to paint the outside of the house a new color. We just finished cleaning the vinyl siding parts of her house, so the painted stucco part was really looking drab by comparison.

We were given the opportunity to paint the house using the Wagner Flexio 970 Sprayer and BEHR exterior paint.

We’ll talk about it more later, but using the paint sprayer was the only way we could have managed this job. We learned that stucco is hard to paint with traditional methods. The paint sprayer made it a doable DIY project that many homeowners could undertake themselves.

Materials

• Cleaning brushes
• Leaf blower
• Ladder
• Garden hose with sprayer tip
• Home Armor E-Z House Wash
• DAP caulk
• Exterior Painter’s Tape
• Pre-Taped Painter’s Plastic Drop Cloth with Dispenser
• Scrap paper for masking
• BEHR Exterior Paint
• Wagner Flexio 970 Sprayer
• Long handled paint roller
• Paint brush
• (2) Five-gallon buckets for cleaning
• Dish washing detergent

Before You Paint

Anyone who has ever painted anything will tell you that the prep work takes the most amount of time. Our painting project was no exception.

Here’s what we did to get ready to actually paint.

Choose a color

We picked Behr Premium Plus Ultra Exterior Satin Paint in Grey Flannel. If your home is part of an homeowners’ association be sure to have your color choice approved.

Buy paint and materials

Start with a minimum of 5 gallons of paint.

Remove hardware from the house

This includes house numbers, light fixtures, flag pole bracket, etc.

Repair cracks and holes

We filled in cracks in the stucco and used DAP caulk to seal around the garage door and under one window.

Brush or blow loose dirt

Go over the walls, soffits, and gutters. If needed, trim any bushes close to the painting area and rake organic material away from the foundation.

Wash the exterior

We spent a lot of time determining how we were going to clean the stucco—pressure wash or house wash? Washing the house, much like we had just done to clean the siding, seemed the way to go.

We attached the Home Armor house wash to the hose and sprayed everything down. After letting it set for 10 minutes, scrubbed some of the dirtier areas and then sprayed it down with clean water. We worked in small sections so it didn’t have a chance to dry.

Note: Wear old clothing as the Home Armor can bleach your clothing.

Mask anything you don’t want painted

While the siding was drying, we started masking the door, windows, soffits, gutters, and outlets.

The pre-taped painter’s plastic drop cloth was really handy for taping off the doors and windows. A Home Depot store associate advised us to use the exterior 3M tape. We needed something to flex around the large curved window and he suggested this product—it was perfect!

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Painting the House with a Paint Sprayer

Read and follow instructions on the paint sprayer. We found the instructions to be very straight forward, well illustrated, and easy to understand. The large quick-start fold out was especially convenient.

We didn’t have any particular difficulties getting it set up and ready to go. The cool thing about this sprayer is the pump goes right into the paint bucket—no extra container needed!

Spray the large sections of walls

We sprayed almost to the point where the soffits meet the wall.

Follow the spraying with a paint roller

If the paint sags at any point or doesn’t fully cover, smooth this out with a roller or brush.

Roll or brush hard to reach areas

We chose to hand paint areas that we could not safely mask off (like the area above the large curved window).

Clean the sprayer

Clean up can be a chore with sprayers, but this one took only 20 minutes and wasn’t complicated. The two five gallon buckets held clean soapy water in which to run through the spray gun and tubing. Follow the instructions included with the sprayer.

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When You’re Done Painting

First, remove all masking material.

Touch up where needed. At this step, we hand rolled a fresh coat of white paint on the garage.

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What We Learned

Check the extended weather forecast before starting

We had a deadline in which to paint the house. We ended up having a window of only 2½ days of sunny weather in which to start and finish the house. If you’re planning on painting be sure to check the weather and plan accordingly.

Choose the painting tool that matches the surface you are painting

A paint sprayer was the perfect tool for this project. We have used two different paint sprayers in the past with very poor results so we were a little hesitant about using this one. It was a pleasant surprise to see how well the sprayer worked. After experiencing how difficult it was to paint stucco with a brush and roller, we realized that using a sprayer was the only way to go. It made very short work of the actual painting process.

The gray we chose for the house is absolute perfection and fits in very well with the surrounding homes in the neighborhood.

You can find all the materials you need for using a paint sprayer in The Home Depot’s Paint Department. You can also rent a paint sprayer from The Home Depot.

Follow our All About Paint board on Pinterest for more painting ideas and inspiration, and check our more DIY projects here on The Home Depot Blog.

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