This summer we embarked on our biggest house project yet…
We painted our house!
It took us 2 months and a ton of work, but we finished last week and we are so happy with how it turned out.
We live in a 230 year old New England Saltbox, which means, it was built on a stone foundation with no moisture barrier so ideally our house needs to be touched up at least every 5-8 years. It had probably been closer to 20 years since the last time this house was fully painted so it was well overdue.
We made the decision to paint it ourselves. Hiring someone to paint your house is no small investment, it can run $10,000-15,000 even without all the scraping we needed done, and we decided that we’d rather do the job ourselves and put the money towards taking our kids on a trip to Europe this summer. Now that we’ve finished, I’m really glad we have our Norway trip as a big reward because that job was a doozy!
When we began the work, we naively thought the project would take us 2 weeks and be “fairly easy.” Boy were we wrong. They say ignorance is bliss, but just in case you too, are considering painting your own house, I thought I would share the nitty gritty of the whole process with you.
Before we get too far, let’s take a little look at the before… left picture is the week we moved into our house 5 years ago, and the picture on the right is what it looked like after we power washed and scraped:
Before.
After!
I’m going to share the entire process we went through to paint the house, the color we chose, and the tools we used.
First up, the prep.
Before we could crack open the first paint can, there was a lot of prep work to be done. The first step was pressure washing the entire house and roof. Boy did it need it. Living out in the country surrounded by enormous maple trees does not a clean house make. We ended up buying a high powered pressure washer which made sense for us, because I’d like to be able to wash the house fairly often (see above for how dirty things get) and we have a barn and chicken coop that could also use a good pressure wash each season.
This is the pressure washer we bought and it was completely awesome! Now that we have one, I have no idea why we didn’t buy one earlier. (And even in the other houses we owned). There are so many great ways to use a pressure washer, everything from driveways and sidewalks, to porches and fences can benefit from a good cleaning each spring. We figured this pressure washer paid for itself in the first use.
The great thing about starting with pressure washing was that when it was at the highest setting, it actually removed a fair bit of the chipping and peeling paint right off the bat. This saved us some time, since removing the peeling paint was the most labor intensive part of the process. Which leads me to…
Scraping.
This was the longest and least pleasant part of the whole house painting process, mostly because it was so tedious. But it was also very necessary. The entire house needed to be gone over by hand and scraped for any additional loose, peeling or chipping paint, and let’s just say… there was a lot. This was a crucial part of the prep, so we didn’t skip it, but boy was I tempted. We had all 6 of us working on it a few hours a day for weeks, and eventually it all got done! We used the handheld scrapers below and they were perfect for the process.
Time to paint!
Once all the prep work was complete it was time to prime and paint. Because the house was already painted, we only needed to prime areas that had been scraped down to bare wood. This would help the paint adhere properly, keep the wood from showing through the paint eventually, and serve as a moisture barrier. It took 3 cans of primer to prime all of the bare wood spots (there were a lot), and an afternoon of work.
Once everything was primed it was finally, finally time to paint! We chose the color Simply White by Benjamin Moore and we absolutely love it. The house was already white and I loved it white. I’ve always loved white houses, but I wanted to brighten it up a bit, while still choosing a white that had a little bit of depth and creaminess without looking yellow, or so bright that it was glowing. Simply White was PERFECT!
We used a paint sprayer to paint the house, and really that’s the only practical way you could do this project. Because of the way our siding is, without a paint sprayer you would literally be brushing the paint on by hand and it would take for-ev-er. With the sprayer, the actual painting part of the process was relatively fast. It really only took us about a week (working all day on Saturday, and then a few weeknights) to paint our entire 3,500 square foot house. That is entirely because of this paint sprayer. It’s a bit of a process to learn how to set it up and then obviously to clean it, but the smooth and quick finish more than makes up for it. I highly recommend it if you are in the market.
Craig used the paint sprayer and this paint shield and was able to spray almost completely up to the edges everywhere. We had very little that had to be brushed on, and didn’t do any taping, or covering on the roof or windows. Seriously the combination of those two tools was amazing.
To paint our entire 3,500 square foot house it took 15 gallons of paint and we used almost every drop. We used Benjamin Moore’s regal select line in a flat finish. Flat is the best finish for a house as old as ours because it hides the imperfections the best (and there are plenty of those). The higher the gloss, the more they show…
What it cost.
All in all, the total cost to paint the house ourselves was around $2,000. That is with all the tools, including the pressure washer and paint sprayer. It’s not a cheap project, especially considering $1000 of that was paint alone, but given how much we would have had to spend to have someone else do it, we are really happy with the savings. And we now own a great pressure washer and paint sprayer for future projects!
All the tools we used:
Would we DIY this project again?
Short answer, yes.
Saving $10-15,000 was a nice perk, but the best part is, we all feel an enormous sense of pride in the work we did. This was a huge, hot, hard project, that required a ton of grit from everyone, and every time we walk outside or pull into the driveway, we all gasp and just admire how pretty it looks now. And we did that!
We live in an age of outsourcing; we hire out any unpleasant thing that in generations past we would have done ourselves and in the process I think we’ve lost something important. The pride and self-actualization that comes with doing something with your own two hands, and the absolute joy and satisfaction of seeing and enjoying the fruits of your own labor. My kids grew in grit and maturity by leaps and bounds working on this project this summer. We all did.
And our family motto remains intact.
We can do hard things.
