Preparation is the key to any successful exterior wall coating, or even traditional house painting job, any good painter and decorator will attest to that.
Prep work is essential if your house painting and decorating job is not only going to look good when complete, but also last the test of time, and the ravages of the UK and Irish weather.
So what prep work is needed to ensure a good job? Let’s read on and find out.
Cleaning the wall is the fist step to a successful wall coating job.
The best way to get rid of dirt on your exterior walls is to take care of it in the first place.
There are many products on the market that are designed to help us do just that. Some are even self cleaning. However, there are still some things we need to do before we can get started.
For starters, any good wall coating firm will make sure they have the right equipment.
This could mean a hose and spray nozzle and a good quality power washer, preferably on a low pressure setting.
It may also require us to wear some protective clothing and footwear.
The best part is that you don’t need a lot of money or expertise to get the cleaning job done.
In fact, this can be a fun job to do, I know we enjoy it very much during the summer months, cleaning walls can be very satisfying.
However DIY aside, if you have a large home, you might want to consider hiring a professional to do this, such as ourselves.
A company that specialises in wall coatings will likely offer their expertise for a reasonable fee, although there are companies that just do cleaning only, and that is not us.
We do it as part of the overall preparation before we spray apply an exterior wall coating.
We of course use a high pressure cleaner to do this as a garden hose just wouldn’t do the job.
Exterior house repair and painting has to be done right, or not at all.
When it comes to painting an exterior wall, you want to make sure that you take all the necessary steps to ensure the best results. This means that we need to get rid of all the debris and mould beforehand.
This can often include flaking and cracked paint, which if it has come loose from the actual wall surface, should be removed.
Never ever paint over old paint that is loose, as the end result will look terrible.
If a house has lots of flaking paint, we lay down sheets on the floors around the house, or else we would spend a week picking up all the tiny bits of flaked paint.
There are various methods to remove flaky paint, namely using paint stripper and a power washer, elbow grease (!) with a scraper and wire brush, using an air powered needle gun or shot blasting, but these are extreme cases and only used where it is agreed that the paint surface is not good enough to accept new paint over the top.
Once the area is clean, we can move on to the next step.
One of the most important steps when it comes to exterior painting is sealing the cracks.
Cracks can create a seepage problem. If you don’t seal them, water can seep into the paint, causing it to flake off.
Even worse, the existence of cracks on the outside wall can cause damp to enter into your home.
Part of the benefits of having an exterior wall coating is the fact that all the work we do, will eliminate damp in your house.
Once all cracks are identified by the wall coating foreman in charge of the job, they are cut out and filled to a finish that is undetectable once the paint is applied over the top.
Render repairs are also needed to ensure a good long lasting job.
If the house has cracks, it is quite normal for us to find loose and hollow rendering (or pebbledash)
Cracks let in water, which goes behind the render. This then freezes during cold weather.
As you probably know, water expands when it turns to ice.
This has a mechanical effect of expanding and then pushing the render away from the bricks beneath.
This cannot be simply painted over and ignored, the render on a house provides an essential function in weatherproofing and basically holding it all together so any defects must be taken seriously.
If we find loose render, we remove it and replace it to match the existing wall surface.
Unfortunately if you choose a traditional painter and decorator rather than an exterior wall coating company, you may find that rendering is beyond their level of competence and they may simply paint over the bad bits.
This is because they actively WANT to keep being called back each year to repaint, whereas as much as we genuinely like our customers, we don’t WANT to see them for at least 20 years, the guarantee period we offer, although it’s nothing personal!
The next important stage of prep work is to cover over the areas not to be painted.
When we work on a house we try and minimise any mess caused, after all this is your home and not a building site.
We take great care with lawns and paths, using dust sheets, which we also use to wrap up plants, trees and bushes.
This saves a lot of time at the end of the job in not having to spend days cleaning up.
We then use masking tape and brown paper and cover over all pipes, gutters, fascia boards, doors and windows.
Primer is a great way to prevent water from leaking through the walls, and is an essential step in making sure the exterior wall coating system adheres properly to the wall surface when applied.
It’s a specially formulated paint that sticks to the wall, helping to create a strong and durable bond.
Before the primer is added to the property, all defects must have been properly corrected.
If this stage is skipped, perhaps by a cowboy wall coating company, the job will not last, and they will be long gone with your hard earned money.
This is often the stage of the job where we walk the customer around their home and show them the extent of repair needed, which is often more than they thought it was.
Applying primer coat, an essential stage before spraying a wall coating.
Priming a wall surface before applying an exterior wall coating is a good idea.
This process will create a smoother finish and help the final product look more attractive.
It will also improve the durability of the painted area.
Before priming, we make sure that the wall is free from cracks, holes, or other imperfections.
These holes and cracks should be sealed with special crack sealant compound, or as mentioned above, filled with mortar and smoothed to the existing wall finish.
In the case of bad cracks where there is the possibility of the cracks opening up again, an epoxy resin mortar is used, which comes with a 2 pack formula and is essentially “super glue” for walls!
We apply the primer using a combination of rollers and brushes, although in some cases it can actually be sprayed on, which is the fastest method available to us.
Once the primer coating has dried that is the end of the prep work required and we start to set up our spraying machine to apply the final top coat.
Applying hydrophobic exterior wall coatings
The final stage is to actually apply the wall coating to the walls, which is done using a high pressure spraying machine.
This fuses the coating onto the wall, and gets into every nook and cranny, ensuring a high quality, and long lasting paint finish, which will look great, and require no more painting, for over 20 years.
This is by far the quickest (and most satisfying) aspect of the job.
All our wall coating products are hydrophobic.
Hydrophobic coatings are coatings which actively repel water, which beads off and runs away into drainage, you can see a similar effect if you wash up a teflon frying pan in the your kitchen.
The equipment we use to do this has to be specially imported from the USA and takes a long time to be trained to use it. It is not something that you can hire yourself, it’s not a DIY job.
Once the coating has been applied, the masking is removed and taken off site, plus the dust sheets are taken up and the whole area is cleaned.
As you can see the amount of prep work required to install an exterior wall coating is far more thorough than most people think, and far more in depth than your local painter and decorator is prepared to do.
The principal benefits of having an exterior wall coating on your house instead of masonry paint are: A 20 year lifespan, resistance to damp, mould and algae, resistance to sea salt and coastal weather, and the coating will not fade, crack, chip or peel.
This is one reason why having your house painted with a durable and long life exterior wall coating is far preferable to having a coat of masonry paint, which does not and will not last very long and affords no protection against the weather.
If the system interests you, please do get in touch with us for a free quote, by calling 0800 970 4928 or contact the team by sending us an email.