How To Prevent Lap Marks When Painting
Every once in a while, many homeowners decide to repaint the interior of their room to retouch the walls or to completely change the color of the walls. While some homeowners pay a professional interior painter to paint the walls for them, other homeowners decide to do the job on their own. Most homeowners find the job of painting their interior walls fairly simple. However, some homeowners run into issues like lap marks. If you have a hard time avoiding lap marks when painting, here are a few prevention tips that should prove to be effective.
What Are Lap Marks?
Chances are, you don’t even know what lap marks are. However, if you’ve done any interior painting before, chances are you’ve encountered lap marks without knowing what they really are. Lap marks are differences in sheen and color that occur when dry and wet layers overlap while the homeowner is painting. Oftentimes, lap marks look like a higher gloss or denser color. As you can imagine, lap marks are a huge point of frustration for homeowners attempting to paint their home’s interior walls.Fortunately, there are a few things that you can do to prevent lap marks when painting.
What Causes Lap Marks?
In order to prevent lap marks, it is important to know what causes the lap marks in the first place. As stated above, overlap between dry and wet layers during painting or even staining is the major cause of lap marks. However, lap marks can also occur if a homeowner is applying paint in direct sunlight or in warm conditions. Also, if the surface of application is too porous for the paint or stain, lap marks are more likely.
When it comes to painting large surfaces, you should not paint entirely from top to bottom. Instead, you should paint the walls in sections that are small enough that you can still have a wet edge. You should also avoid painting on days that are windy or hot. Such days will make the paint on the walls dry faster, increasing the likelihood of lap marks.
How to Resolve Lap Marks
Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try to prevent lap marks, it is likely that you will see a few after painting your home’s interior walls. In order to resolve these lap marks, you will need to do a little repainting. Simply apply another coat of paint to cover the lap marks. When reapplying the paint, you should make sure to spread the paint as uniformly as possible. You may need to add a primer coat or a second coat of paint if the surface of application is very porous or if the finish is largely transparent.
For more information about how to prevent lap marks when painting, don’t hesitate to contact us here at Perkins Painting LLC.
