How to prepare skirting boards for painting - Step by step guide

Stay tuned guys because in this video I'm going to show you the best way to

prepare

a baseboard for

painting

. Hello, what's up guys? JB here and thanks for tuning in. If this is your first time visiting my channel, why not? Go ahead and subscribe, that would be fantastic. Now, like I said, I'm going to show you the best way to

prepare

a baseboard or, in particular, this baseboard for

painting

. If you have watched other videos on YouTube, you would have noticed this. that people do prep and paint different ways so I'm going to show you the best way and from my experience what has worked best over the years now that this baseboard has been painted this is a top coat , so obviously there is no need for a base coat or primer, however, if I were putting primer or base coat there and I was also painting the wall, I would let this base coat hit the wall so that when I painted the wall and the baseboard it would give me a nice straight line. here, but since I'm going to keep the paint on the wall, in other words I'm not going to repaint the wall here, I need to cut through the top coat here, so when I sand it I need to make sure that I'm not ruining the wall here , I don't want to start removing paint from the wall.

What you want to do here before you paint is make sure you rub this in to get a nice rough surface to allow for the new paint. Moving on, I'm just going to use some 120 paper here because you'll probably need to scratch or file the surface to allow the paint to adhere and adhere much better. This is quite shiny and very smooth if I put the paint directly on top of this, it won't be long before it starts to peel off. I have my piece of 120 grit sandpaper, a good sized piece, fold it over and that will give you a good grip on one side while you The 120 grit sandpaper is not too coarse, but over time it will leave your fingers rough, so if you want to keep those hands soft, be sure to put on a pair of gloves.

It's also worth checking before you start sanding that there is no food or dirt on the baseboard because that will clog the sandpaper and that's not good. If you're sanding make sure you have a proper dust mask so just use my thumb under the paper as a

guide

, I'm just going to run it along the top of the baseboard and that way I'm not going to hit the wall and start remove the paint. Now that the top surface is done, I'm going to sand the face of the skirt here and what you want to do is allow the sandpaper to get behind the carpet here because we're going to paint the baseboard pretty deep behind this carpet, like this Make sure the paper goes down under the mat as we go back.

Now you don't need to go crazy, you will start to notice the socket getting scratched and that's all you want to get to. We have a slight radius on this socket, so what am I going to do here? It's just tearing off a smaller piece of paper and rounding it off like this so we can stand up and just scratch that radius again, but don't get too upset because it's the radius where you're most likely going to remove too much paint. If you apply too much pressure once the gloss or shine on the baseboard has worn off, then you'll know you've sanded it well enough.

Once you've sanded, you can vacuum. Oops, I mean vacuum, not vacuum, so just once. I've already sanded and vacuumed, then I'll mask because you don't really want to mask and then I'll start sanding and getting dirty because then it'll also get all the dust and bits with the masking tape and If then you put the vacuum on it, you'll start picking it up, like this which cleans all the sand and then masks. It is best to get a 2-inch or 50-millimeter roll of masking tape. You can use the thinner material. the 1 inch one, but it is a little more complicated and almost twice as long to place because you need to place two strips.

Now we dust off for this part while we place the masking tape on the mat now ideally what we want to do is get it as deep as possible into that slot so what we're going to do is open up a stretch we hold the tape here we hold the tape against the baseboard because so it stays nice and tight and then what I'm going to do is just glue it down slightly, but it's very tight against the baseboard and it's almost raised slightly and that's exactly where I want it, maybe a little bit further away for the purpose of this demonstration.

I'm going to tear that tape off from there and I'm going to mask off the rest of it in a moment so you can see there's a round on one end of the tape here, but I'm going to glue the rest of it down to make sure it's glued in real good and then from here I'm just going to I'm going to pull it back and tuck it in, so I just pull the mat and the tape back and then I just tuck that end of the tape down into the mat so you can see. how that's stuck right in that groove now, this is what you want to avoid when doing any kind of masking.

What I've seen some people do is when they mask up, they put it on the mat here and they're almost gone. stuck to the baseboard now, what will happen here is that when you start painting the baseboard and remove the tape, not only are you likely to tear off the paint but you will also get a very visible line on the carpet where it hasn't been painted, so This is not right, we don't want to do it like this, we want to pull the carpet back, tuck it in so that there is no tape stuck to the baseboard.

Now if you have any architrave that you need. Painting the sand in the process is exactly the same as the plinth, however we will need to mask around this area here and sometimes around the architrave can be a bit tricky, this isn't too bad, it doesn't have much of a profile. on this, but some profiles or some architraves are very detailed so it may take a little bit of time to mask them out, but it's very simple, so what we're going to do is we're just going to put another piece towards the end here and I'm using that same technique of stick the tape in that slot, I just start cutting smaller pieces and I start seeing where I can put them so that that piece fits pretty well in there and I just tuck that corner right in there, a little bit. shown here, so all we have to do is just add another piece of tape in there, so really all you're doing is using the different shapes of pieces of tape that you're cutting to fill in the spaces, no matter how many pieces of tape you use as long as you keep that rug covered because what you don't want is paint on the rug and you run the risk of annoying your ladies or the client there perfect who is ready to paint now that I've done all the masking up, This piece of baseboard is ready to paint.

What I just want to talk about very quickly is should I mask off the wall, like I said, I'm going to keep this wall color, this paint, I don't want to ruin it. I don't want to touch it, so I have two options: either I can't mask it and just cut it out or I can mask it, which means if I mask it I'll get a very straight line. However, I run the risk of bleeding when I do so. I say bleed, I mean paint that bleeds, the paint bleeds through the tape and that will cause a bit of a mess on the wall that I will have to fix later.

This duct tape is a very general purpose duct tape and will likely leak or bleed. I've used some other tape, particularly frog tape, it's pretty good, but you still have to make sure you stick it very, very tight to prevent paint from penetrating or seeping under the edge, so I have a few years of experience. of cutting and painting so I'm not going to do this but I run the risk of getting the paint on the wall and by not masking there are pros and cons so I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope I don't mess up the wall just before starting to paint.

I'm going to quickly brush the baseboard with my dusting brush, although I've already vacuumed, here we go. That's lovely, beautiful and soft plus, it's ready to paint. Well, I'm just going to use some quick dry satin wood, which means it's a water based paint. If it's quick-drying, it usually means it's water-based. just open this up, it hasn't been used for a while, there is a little bit of settling so I'm going to shake it up quickly with my trusty stirrer, it doesn't take long with water based paint if you're using oil. -Based on it and you haven't used it for a while, you will find that after a while a lot of oil settles on the surface.

It requires a little more stirring, but it's ready, it's all lovely and smooth. I'm going to be using my Hamilton brush for cutting with a fantastic little brush. This is the one you can see in a video of this if you want. I'll leave the link up there right now. What about that? I have wet it, I have moistened it slightly. um just to protect it a little bit more, make it a little bit easier to clean, it won't stay wet for a long time like it does with wet paint wet for a long time because I only have this part to do and then I'm going to go and wash it, but make sure of wrapping your brushes or cleaning them as soon as possible after using them, of course, what we can do at this stage is simply bring the dust sheet closer to the adhesive tape, there we go, that's it.

Well, that way we really reduce the risk of paint staining the carpet now. Usually I would use a teapot to paint, take some paint from the pot to a teapot, um, that would be the best I could do, but since I'm on my own. I'm not going to bother making some, but the advantage of doing it is that you don't put any bits of sand or dust or anything back in the pot and end up contaminating it, so I always try to pour a little of this into a teapot. , if possible, um, like I said, I'm just going to dip it right in, so load the brush lightly now, over a period of time, your brush will end up with more and more paint in it, um, but for now.

I just soaked in about half or a third of it, so we'll start here by just doing a few long brush strokes just to get some of the paint off the brush and then I'll get started. By cutting along the top, now this brush really makes it simple and easy to cut when we paint along the bottom. Here I would usually use a fairly pointy part of the brush like here and I just press down and allow the bristles to go straight to the bottom of the baseboard and since we've put the masking tape right inside there's very little chance of getting any stains on the carpet. paint there, so again I'm going to get rid of some paint.

The main part of the skirt is here and then I'm going to go over the top and cut it out when you're painting the baseboard, make sure you do it this way along the baseboard because with water based paint. Especially what you'll see are the brush marks and if you start going up and down like that in all directions it's going to look a little messy so keep all the brush marks lined up now being a quick drying paint means the paint dries fast, very fast, I actually painted this about 20 minutes ago, yeah I had a little break, had a cup of tea and I'm ready to remove the tape now.

I wouldn't leave it until it's completely dry. Because you still run the risk of ripping or tearing off the paint, you want to leave it to get a little tacky because where the paint is on the baseboard and also on the masking tape, as you can see here, you could quite easily tear off a load of paint if it dries, so we're going to go ahead and remove it now and I want to show you the best way to do it and if you're using oil based paint, I'll probably leave it on. A couple of hours before removing the tape again, let it dry a little and get a little sticky, then remove the tape, but don't leave it on until the next day because it might get a little messy, so here we go, all we go to do.

Now what I do is I gently push down and move away from the socket, so I'm going to tear this piece of tape here and then I'm going to slowly move away, but I'm going to keep this very flat because what I don't want to do is end up running this or against the baseboard and getting the paint all over it, so I'm just going to gently push down and pull the tape off the baseboard while I lift the tape up and we can do it all the way. So there we go, we end up with a beautiful unpainted carpet and a painted skirt up to below the carpet line.

If you end up with paint seeping between the baseboard and the tape, you can grab it yourself. a flat edge like this and run one side deep into the carpet against the baseboard and that will just remove the paint stains and almost make them disappear and that's how to prep and paint the baseboard well, I hope you found it. how useful and why don't you give us a thumbs up if you like the video and any comments or questions you have, drop them in the comment box below and go ahead and subscribe. It will be fantastic.

I would really appreciate your support, so why not? Don't go visit my website: www.justinbailey.co.uk. I'll put a link down there and why don't you go check out my new store on Amazon? You will find many recommendations. products there, I'll also leave a link for that in the description box below, great, I'm done. I need to clear up this lot now. See you next time