So you’ve noticed the hands of time have been ticking, the seasons have been passing and the exterior of your home is beginning to show its true age. It’s that time again, time to get outside and putting in some labour to get your house cleaned up, its been a while and you know it!

Before you start Painting the exterior of your house, there’s a few tips you should follow in order to get the best possible outcome.

There are many variables involved when painting the exterior of a home, as the surfaces, structural design, size and layout of every home varies greatly. Some exterior painting jobs are much harder than others. But if think you are ready to take on the challenge of DIY and painting the exterior of your house, we have a few tips that will make your project a lot easier.

1. Plan Before Painting

Before you get started on anything, you need to take a step back and gauge the work you have ahead. Figure out exactly it is you want to achieve, decide what colour and types of paint you want to use, any trees or shrubbery that you may need to trim in order to be able to complete the job. Write everything down so you are organised before you go into it.

I have seen this step missed countless times, and often ends in a less than desirable end result, especially when you forget to consider how the colour of paint will look when the whole house is painted and end up with an eye sore!

2. Get The Right Materials For The Job

This is really another part of the planning process, that neglecting could end in disaster. Imagine you have started painting a Wall and halfway through you run out of paint, you run to the the local paint shop and come back to continue the wall, only to find the first half has dried, leaving an obvious line through the middle of the wall. You don’t want that! And it’s easy to avoid.

There are a number of useful painting tools and accessories which you will need to get the job done right. Here is a rough list of some of the things that will help you achieve the best result.

• Paint! (Of course)...choose a good quality masonry all acrylic paint.
• Painters Drop Sheets or old bed sheets.
• A variety of sizes of brushes and rollers.
• Paint thinners.
• Sandpaper, filler and putty.
• Masking tape.
• Scrapers, a wire brush.
• Rags for cleaning up paint.
• Appropriate sized ladders.

You’ll want to have all the materials you plan on using during the project before you start. So it helps writing them down as a list during the preparation period.

3. Before You Begin Painting - Clean The Walls

Houses are exposed to the elements, so suffice to say, they get dirty quick. The exterior walls old your home will have much more dirt, dust and grime on them than the interior walls. You need to clean these walls before you begin painting the walls, do not paint over dirty and grimy walls, the end result will look horrible.

Depending on what the surface of your walls is made of and how grimey they are, you may want to use a power washer, but nothing too powerful, just the kind of power washer you would use to clean your driveway or car.

4. Rather Than Brushing the Paint On - Use a Paint Sprayer

Using a paint sprayer over traditional brushes has a number of benefits for painting home exteriors. Using an airless sprayer gets the job done way quicker and is much easier to cover larger areas. This is particularly convenient for painting larger walls. Another main advantage to using a spray gun over brushes, is their ability to apply an even coat of paint over uneven surfaces, take for example a bricked wall.

While there are obvious advantages of painting with a sprayer, there are also some disadvantages. When working outdoors, you are with the elements, wind blows! You obviously only want to paint the walls of your house, not the windows, pipes, trimmings, pavement. So before painting with a paint sprayer you will need to ensure that you properly mask up areas that you don’t want the paint to get on. This means covering everything with drop sheets and plastic sheets before you begin painting.

5. Prepare the Wall For Painting

The preparation before painting a house is one of the most crucial parts of the project. The more time you spend on preparation, the more time you will save on extra work and cleaning up afterwards.

You will need to completely prepare the walls for painting, this means filling in any cracks, removing mould, dirt and grime, basically just cleaning it up. Sand down any rough areas, filling in any holes and cracks.

6. Factor in These Weather Conditions

When painting the exterior of your home, you need to factor in weather conditions, much more than you need to when you are painting interior walls.

Certain weather conditions are more ideal for priming and adding coats of paint to the surface of your home. As a very general rule of thumb, the ideal temperature for painting your home is between about 10 and 32 degrees Celsius, ideally on days that are not too sunny, not too windy and not too wet.

Painting in unideal weather conditions can result in long terms consequences. Here are some of the conditions you should avoid when painting the exterior of your home.

Wet surfaces

Moisture affects the way paint dries. Even if the wall doesn't appear to be wet, it may still have latent moisture, painting over a wet wall will not allow the paint to dry properly and you will end up with less than desirable results.

In The Cold

The majority of latex paints should not be applied when the temperature is below 10 degrees Celsius, this is for a few reasons:

• Paint dries slower in cold temperatures.
• Wet paint collects more dirt, pollen and insects.
• Multiple coatings aren’t easily applied, since the paint doesn’t dry quick enough between coats; blistering occurs.

In Hot Weather

Weather that’s also too hot or too sunny is also not ideal for painting. The opposite occurs, rather than the paint drying too slowly, the paint dries too quickly.

If you are planning to paint your house in the summer, there’s a few things you should avoid:

• Avoid painting when temperatures are exceeding 32 degrees celsius.
• Try not to paint in direct sunlight.
• Avoid days that are too windy.