If your home’s exterior is made out of stucco, you know that stucco looks great. But even the most beautiful homes could use a little makeover every now and then, and stucco homes are no exception. A fresh coat of paint does more than give you pride in a beautiful home; it enhances your property’s curb appeal and, therefore, its value.
Stucco is extremely durable and weather-resistant, but its paint isn’t. Constant exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays and general weather conditions can cause paint to deteriorate. Your old coat of paint could become flakey, peel off, and even lose its once vibrant colour. And no one wants their home to look more run down than it actually is.
Applying a fresh coat of paint on your house can boost your property’s curb appeal, but it’s a big job. Before you open up a fresh can of paint and start lathering up your exterior walls with a paint roller, there is a series of steps you should follow to ensure you get the best results and a new, beautiful coat of paint on your home. Keep reading to learn how to prepare and paint your stucco with a paint roller.
Preparing for Painting
Inspecting the Stucco
The first thing you should do when prepping to paint your stucco is to do a basic inspection of the condition of the stucco. Take the time to walk around the outside of your home and carefully look for cracks, spots that are peeling, and holes in the stucco. You’ll need to make sure these blemishes are fixed before you paint over them.
For minor repairs, you can fix them yourself with a good acrylic caulk or a premixed stucco repair kit—both of which you can pick up at your local hardware store. For larger, more significant repairs, check out the website of a local stucco contractor like this one, magnumstucco.com. Professional stucco contractors will have the tools and expertise to take care of stucco repairs that are too much for you to handle on your own.
Plan How To Reach Tough Areas
Painting with a roller means you’ll need to get relatively close to every spot around your house. If your house is one story high, you probably won’t need much more than a step ladder or extension ladder. But if you need to figure a way to paint a two or three-story house, simple ladders aren’t going to cut it. Fortunately, you can buy or rent scaffolding for this very purpose. As long as you plan ahead and manage to get yourself access to every section of stucco, you’ll be good to go.
Cleaning Your Stucco
To ensure the paint doesn’t flake off over time, it’s important to clean off any dirt or debris off the stucco’s surface before painting. Ideally, you want to use a pressure washer to spray down the siding. If you don’t own a pressure washer or can’t find one to rent, you can also use your garden hose, just be aware that it likely won’t be as effective at removing debris.
Remember, you must clean your stucco AFTER doing the inspection and repairing any blemishes you find. Otherwise, water from the hose or pressure water can make its way into cracks and holes, possibly resulting in water damage or mould growth down the road.
Buy the Right Amount of Paint
Running out of paint before finishing stucco painting is a huge annoyance. To ensure you have enough paint to finish the job, measure your walls. You can measure smaller homes with a standard tape measure, but you might need to use a measuring wheel or laser tape measure if your house is on the larger side.
Once you’ve measured the surface area you’re going to paint, it’s time to calculate how much paint you need to buy. One gallon of paint will cover about 400 square feet of space. But don’t try to buy the exact amount of paint required to cover every square inch perfectly. It’s better to be left with extra paint than to run out midway through the process. Add an extra 25-30 percent to what you think you’re going to need.
Safety Gear
Before you paint, you have to gear up. When painting, wear safety glasses, gloves, and a dust mask to protect yourself from paint fumes.
Applying the Primer
Since stucco is porous, you’re going to want to apply a primer to seal the surface material so the top coat of paint doesn’t soak into the stucco and dry unevenly. Fortunately, you can apply primer with a paint roller. To get started, pour the primer into your paint tray and thoroughly coat your roller. To ensure you get the most even coverage possible, use the top-down rule: work from the uppermost areas down to the bottom.
Painting
Stucco painting is very similar to applying the primer. Start by filling the paint tray with the paint you picked out, coat the roller, and use the top-down rule. Sometimes ladders can scrape off flakes of paint when they rub against the stucco. To avoid this, you can use a useful product called ladder mitts.
Always roll into the wet paint instead of away from it to ensure you don’t end up with ridges overlapping marks. You’ll be able to cover almost every inch of your exterior with a roller, but it’s never a bad idea to keep a paintbrush on hand to fill in the gaps where it’s tough to fit a roller.
Clean Up
The least glamorous part of stucco painting, but still very important, is the clean up. No job is finished until all the equipment is packed up and stored away. Your paint roller will be covered in paint, so rinse in water until the water runs clear, then squeeze out the remaining liquid. Once the roller is rinsed, store it in a plastic bag. Put away your ladders, take down any scaffolding, and pick up any other items you used during the process, and voila! You’ve successfully finished your job as a stucco painter.
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