How To Prep And Paint Wooden Trim


If you're looking for a cheap way to remodel the exterior of your house, you should consider a paint job. Repainting your walls does more than just change the color. It helps seal your sidewalls and protects them from the elements. However, a full-scale exterior paint job might still be beyond your personal budget. As an alternative, you can paint just the trim around your roof line, windows and door frames. This will obviously take much less time and money, but it will still change the style of your exterior. By changing the trim color, you can add new life to the main wall color by creating a new contrast. This article explains how to repair and paint exterior wooden trim.

Prepping the Trim

Before you begin painting, you will probably need to do a fair amount of preparation work. Of course, you can just paint over the existing paint, but there are likely holes, dings and areas where the wood is warped. If you recaulk the holes and the edges of the trim, you can secure them and ultimately make them last longer and look better.

The only way to get this job done is to simply get outside, get up on the ladder and visually inspect your trim. Wherever you see a small hole or damaged area, fill it with exterior wood putty. Larger holes will need to be filled and then sanded down so the putty blends in with the existing wood grains. Caulking along the edges of your window and door trim will take a little more time. But it will ultimately allow you to get straighter lines when you paint your trim. The key to caulking is to shoot it into the corner of the trim with a gun. Then, wearing a latex glove, use your finger to swipe on the caulk line. This pushes the caulk into the gap and makes the line more even and waterproof.

Painting the Trim

When it comes time to actually paint your trim, the next step is to tape it up. If you wait at least a day for the caulk to completely dry, you can apply the tape directly onto it. Caulk creates a very effective surface for painter's tape to stick to. This means when you paint over it, the paint will not seep underneath the tape.

All in all, you will spend much more time taping and patching your trim that you will actually spend painting. Once all those steps are done, the actual painting goes by very quickly. Since the trim has such a limited surface area, you can usually paint all of the doors, windows and roofline within a few hours.

If you feel you cannot do this on your own, you can enlist painting services, such as Diesel Painting, to help you.

About Me

A Rookie Mistake

A few years ago, my husband and I decided to repaint the inside of our home. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any experience painting the interior of a house at the time. Because I wanted to ensure I splashed enough paint on the walls, I ended up applying too thick of a coat of paint. To make matters worse, I didn’t properly allow the shelves in my master bedroom closet to dry before filling them with many of my prized handbags. As a result, some of these purses ended up getting stained with green paint. On this blog, I hope you will discover the benefits of hiring professional painters to paint the interior of your home. Enjoy!