I'm Andy Sjostrom and my company is the
Good Handyman and I'm here to take care of some projects around the house get
this house ready for sale. A good thing to do before you start
taping off is to take a nice clean rag wet it down and wipe off all the
surfaces that are going to get taped off. Because a dirty dusty surface is not
going to hold that tape very well and you'd be surprised how much dust and
dirt lies up on these flat surfaces like this. So really just need to kind of go
around make sure that it's wiped clean. You don't need any soap. In particular, you
want to use a low adhesive tape that's not going to stick to, especially when
you when you're putting it on drywall, because the concern is that as you peel
that takeaway it will actually remove the top layer of paint and then you've
created a bigger job for yourself. So a low adhesive scotch tape, the blue tape
paint the blue painters tape that everybody knows that's the best stuff.
They make it even in a seven-day piece of quality so that you
can actually leave it on for a full week and not have to worry about it. But get it off as soon as you can
because the less time it spends on, the better. So in a situation like this we want to make sure that we get the tape down as
close to the tile as possible but the concern when you're taping or when
you're painting against tape is that you don't want that paint to get into the
porousness of the tile. Whether it be the grout or the tile itself,
they're both porous and they both pick up paint like crazy and
it's more difficult to get pain out of porous surfaces than it is off of a
smooth surface like a countertop or a mirror or something like that.
So tape off nice and tight but give yourself a little bit of play because
you can always come back and touch it up with the brush. A good thing to do once
you've got that tape laid on is you want to take your fingernail or your thumb or
your forefinger and just run it nice and tight against there. Use that to
create a nice tight bond with that tape against the surface as you're working
against. Because if you don't, the paint will actually bleed in and suck in
underneath that tape