Exterior Painting

[Tom]

As summer is coming and hopefully some nice weather too, i have decided its time to paint the outside of the house as its looking a bit merky. Since we have only lived here for 2 years i have never had to face the joy of this job and was wondering what the best was to do it was? The whole house is pebble dashed (stone chipping sizes are approx 10-15mm) and is currently painted in an off white creamy colour, we would like to paint it white. This afternoon i thought i would make a start so used a large masonry paint brush with quite stiff bristles and some Sandtex exterior masonry paint, i took me about one hour to cover 1m square and it still hasn't covered very well!

Has anyone got any tips on doing this? Would it be possible to use some sort of spray gun/compressor to cut down on time, i assume i would have to thin the paint down? Is there some magic brush out there for this type of work? Any idea of cost would also be welcomed if you have recently carried out this task.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Tom.

[andrewpreece]

My experience with painting pebble dash with a stiff stipple brush is similar. I reckon 1.5 square meteres an hour tops, if you want to get good coverage. I never graduated to painting the entire house, but at the time I did remember looking into ways to speed things up, and ISTR that an airless sprayer with a needle diameter of 0.019" - 0.023" was mentioned as the way to go. Not sure if you get lots of spray drifting away and coating the neighbours' cars or suchlike but you can try research in that direction.

Andy.

[Mary Fisher]

Spouse used a large roller on a breeze block wall, might not be the same on pebbledash of course but he refused to use a bruch.

The folk behind have pebbledash and they use a roller too.

Mary

[John Rumm]

Having recently rendered a new bit of house to match the existing rough cast stipple pattern render on the rest of it, I set about painting it. As you say, not easy.

Stiff brush works ok but is slow. Conventional masonry roller is not really effective without a huge amount of force applied. In the end I found a 4" radiator style roller was the most effective, you could get the force behind it to push the paint into the nooks and crannies, and it was a fair bit quicker than the brush. (also has the bonus of fitting behind drain pipes etc)

[Tom]

Thanks for your reply, what do you mean by radiator style roller?

Tom

[John Rumm]

Actually I mean mini rollers like:

technically a "radiator" one is usually long reach like (radiator rollers being designed to paint behind radiators as the name suggests):

the house painting its not the long reach you need, but the narrower and smaller roller head.

[Tom]

Thanks John, i get some ordered. Shame i left it so late as my ladders are arriving from Screwfix this afternoon!

Tom