In this video, painting contractor Mark O’Lalor shares his tips for paint rollers.
Steps:
1. Use only high-quality ⅜-inch-thick nap roller sleeves.
2. Wipe new roller sleeve against duct tape to remove loose lint fibers.
3. Dip new roller sleeve into water, squeeze out the excess water, then spin the roller dry with a spin-dryer tool.
4. Use a paintbrush to cut in around the room perimeter. Allow the paint to dry completely before rolling on any paint.
5. Roll paint from a large roller bucket, not a flat paint tray.
6. Dip the roller sleeve into the paint, then roll off the excess paint inside the roller bucket.
7. Roll a 2-foot to 3-foot-long horizontal strip of paint along the top of the wall, close to the ceiling.
8. Reload the roller in the roller bucket and paint a vertical strip from the baseboard up to the ceiling. Repeat two or three more times until you’ve painted the entire wall section beneath the first horizontal strip of paint.
9. Smooth out the painted section by lightly rolling over the wall; be sure to overlap each previous stroke.
Pro Tip: Jim Clark, a professional painter featured in This Old House Magazine, prefers using a 5-gallon bucket with a hanging grid instead of a pan: “A bucket is harder to tip,” he says, “and also gives you space to mix two gallons together to minimize any color discrepancies.” To load your roller, dip it about a quarter of the way into the paint, then roll it against the grid until the nap is completely saturated.
Technique Detail: According to This Old House Magazine, the best way to distribute paint with a roller is to roll out a W shape within an imaginary three-foot square, then fill in the square and blend the paint with adjacent sections. To finish a section, use very light pressure on the roller while making parallel, overlapping strokes. The key is to always paint toward the wet edge of a just-painted section so the new paint blends seamlessly and there won’t be any visible lap marks.
