Proper cleaning is more necessary for painting than it is for your home. If you want your paint to stick well and last for awhile, you have to clean the surface properly. It even says it on the back of the paint cans: "Remove all loose, peeling paint, dirt, grease and any other surface contaminants." Paint also doesn’t stick to grease, soot or smoke.  Which means areas like kitchens, rooms with fireplaces and rooms where candles have been burned require not only proper cleaning, but definitely a primer coat as well to seal in any left-over residue.  I’m sure you don’t really want to do your painting all over again because of technical difficulties (trust me, it’s always harder trying to fix the ‘short cut’ than just doing things right in the first place).

Proper preparation is always crucial to a good paint job- not just once, but every time. If the first layer isn’t done properly, then it won’t stick well. Then every additional layer adds weight to the first layer that didn’t stick. All the additional weight increases your chances of having the paint come off all the way down to the first dusty layer that didn’t stick. One of our clients learned about this the hard way.

This is what can happen when you don't clean your surface before you paint-
a little hole turns into a whole room nightmare!

A couple of years ago we were called in to fix some ceiling texture and repaint the ceiling. Some of the original texture had come off when their handy-man changed a light fixture- not a large job or a big problem. But it became a large job and more than quadrupled our original time-frame when we found the only place the texture was sticking to the ceiling was on the drywall tape joints.

Everywhere else we could just pick the paint off with our fingers or drywall knives and it came away in long sheets- all the way back to the raw drywall. Nobody had cleaned off the sanding dust from the original taping and whoever painted the ceiling just painted right over the dust.

Now, we had to strip the whole ceiling back to where the paint & texture were actually stuck, clean the surface, prime the raw drywall, re-mud the whole ceiling so it was all the same level, sand it, clean it, re-texture, prime and paint it. A one-day job for two people turned into four long days for three people because somebody in the past cut some corners. Just imagine if this happened to you when all you wanted to do was re-texture a spot and paint a ceiling. One person cutting corners in the past caused a huge expensive problem later on and one big headache for the current home-owner.

I’m sure you know the saying “do it right the first time so you don’t have to do it again.” This applies to painting in general and especially to the Do-It-Yourself-ers who might not know all the ins and outs of the painting biz.

In short:

It all boils down to words to live by: Paint Doesn’t Stick To Dirt!

Yours In Color,
Suzie