How Paint Moves (Viscosity, Flow, and Leveling)

Blue Door Painters describes three important terms in coatings technology.

Effectively painting a wall requires designing a chemical which changes from a liquid to a solid in a very precisely choreographed manner.  If it changes too soon, the coating on the wall will be chunky, rather than smooth.  In addition to looking unattractive, a chunky coating will not be likely to be continuous, and the gaps and breaks in the layer will cause the paint to fail.  On the other hand, a substance that is too runny, and stays in liquid form too long, will run and sag before it hardens, once again creating an unattractive and discontinuous coating that is prone to failure.  Chemists and paint artisans have struggled for years to come up with the perfect chemical mixtures that magically transform from smooth, continuous liquid to solid, sturdy solid at the right time and in the right way.  To do so, scientists had to continuously tweak the viscosity, flow, and leveling of their concoctions.

One way to see the viscosity of your paint is to dip a roller into it.

When you are shopping for paint today, you will find products on the market that still possess a range of properties as far as their state of matter is concerned.  Understanding viscosity, flow, and leveling will help you select the right paint for your job, and will allow you to notice when your paint is not performing as it should.

Viscosity is the paint’s resistance to flow – simply put, how ‘heavy’, ‘thick’, or ‘sticky’ it is.  If paint is runny, it has low viscosity, while if it is tacky and thick, it has high viscosity.  Ideally, right out of the can paint should have the viscosity of a warm maple syrup – runny, but not as runny as water, and with enough thickness to create a slight relief when applied to a surface thickly.  The desired paint viscosity (and the paint performance in general) will vary greatly based on the temperature.  At high temperatures, the viscosity is always lowered, and therefore a higher-viscosity paint is desired to compensate.  The opposite is true for cold temperatures.  In the Washington DC / Northern Virginia area, where the seasons are so variable, attention needs to be payed to the timing of when the project is undertaken to determine what viscosity should be aimed for.

Flow involves both the viscosity of the paint, but it also involves the surface tension.  The surface tension tends to vary according to the viscosity (lower viscosity has more flow and lower surface tension); but this is not a direct correlation.  Various additives can change the chemistry of the paint to create the desired flow even with variation in the viscosity.

When the flow if the paint is not ideal, the coating will demonstrate failure patterns such as running, sagging, chunking, or cratering.  While improper application (and insufficient prep) can also cause these problems, if they happen in your coating, the first thing you should do is check your paint can and contact the manufacturer to make sure that the paint is performing as it ought to.

Finally, the leveling of there paint describes how flat of a surface it can make.  Good leveling requires ideal viscosity and flow, but it also relies on chemical complexities in the paint to neutralize  common issues like fisheyes, craters, blistering, alligatoring, streaking, and other problems that come from a coating that is not perfectly smooth.  Since there will never be a perfectly flat substrate, nor a perfectly ideal administration, the paint will always have to correct for these imperfections with its chemistry.  Paints like Sherwin Williams’ Duration excel at creating smooth, level coatings out of less than ideal conditions.

If you are thinking of painting your home and you want further advice on paint or painting technology, or you are looking for either a free estimate or further product recommendations feel free to contact us!

Decorating with Autumn Colors

Pick colors to fit the season – with Blue Door Painters decorating advice

Fall is the time of year for warm colors.  Reds, oranges, yellows, and browns – accented wherever you need a bright “pop” with the searing light blue of the Washington, DC fall sky, or the white of those puffy clouds that cruise in with the blessedly dry cool fronts.

Warm colors are also an excellent choice for winter.  Research has shown that the psychological ‘temperature’ of a room’s interior – determined entirely by the decorating scheme – has a strong impact on the appeal of that room during the extreme seasons.  People have a strong preference for cool blues, greens, and violets during the hot summer – and for the cozy warmth of the classic fall palette during the frigid winter.

To get your interior ready for the changing seasons, consider adding some warm colors into your design scheme.  Whether you are ready to go all in and warm up all or part of your interior with a whole new paint job, or you only want to focus on the details and make small changes that can be reversed when the earth comes back around in its orbit and the temperature starts warming up again, incorporating warmth into your design scheme is a sophisticated psychological strategy for dealing with the changing season.

A few tips:

– If you have any wood in your interior, bring out the red, orange, or yellow highlights in that wood (if you want to, you can actually bring in a sample of your wood and have a paint store match the color for you – modern color mixing technology is incredibly advanced) by painting, choosing rugs, draperies, and furniture covers, or even by tweaking the simple details in your interior like centerpieces and decorations.  Echoing the warm tones that are already present in your wood will give your design scheme an organic feel that will help you stay relaxed and enhance the sense of security and protection against the winter elements.

– Harmonize with your existing colors.  While warming up a room by choosing an entirely new paint scheme is not necessarily a bad investment (especially in dining rooms, kitchens, and lively gathering rooms where you want to encourage energy), if you don’t want to go that far, you can mix some warm colors into your existing decoration scheme by painting trim or accents, or choosing warm-toned decorations or linens.  You just need to be careful that your new colors look good with the color scheme that you already have.  You can almost always add a warm color into the scheme you have, you just need to find the color that is oriented on the color wheel either close to, or directly across from, the main color in your decorating scheme.  Also condier your variations in the chroma and value; if you have a dull-toned, light-colored room, you may want to avoid bright colors so that they do not appear garish.

– Maximize light with color conturing.  As the days grow darker, it’s time to make your interior grow lighter.  Using light colors makes an area feel more spacious – an important antidote to the stir-crazy that often comes with winter.  Remember that the impact of color is multiplied by the amount of space that that color covers; you would be surprised what a large difference it makes to simply choose a color that is several shades lighter than your existing main color, if you are painting a very large space.

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Your New Years Home Maintenance Resolution

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Gutters, Trim, and Mildew (Oh my!)

Autumn is a beautiful time of year – and it is also a messy time of year.  Between raking leaves and dumping out that dank, tannin-stained water water that collects in your kids’ baby pool, you might not have taken the time to pay attention to your roof, gutter, and window trim.  Entering the late fall and winter with clogged gutters and decomposing trim can lead to much bigger problems down the road, however.

The beauty (and mess) of autumn!
The beauty (and mess) of autumn!

When water cannot drain through your gutters due to accumulated debris, it tends to collect in them, saturating the dead leaves and creating a permanent damp environment analogous to what happens on a forest floor.  As it gets colder, that damp microclimate gets subjected to the same challenging freeze-thaw cycle that the rest of your exterior must withstand: but with the moisture in the gutter expanding and contracting, the gutters are prone to damage.  With clogged and damaged gutters comes the possibility of ice dams, which are buildups of ice around the edges of your roof – these increase the freeze/thaw stress on your roof and leave you vulnerable to structural damage that can allow moisture to enter where you want it least – your interior.

In a similar vein, trim around windows faces the difficult task every winter of withstanding the expansion and contraction of the freeze-thaw cycle, collecting moisture from the exterior and also the condensation occurring from the temperature gradient that often occurs at the window’s surface.  Window trim often wears out before the rest of the exterior because of the difficulty of its job.  However, entering the window with rotting trim creates the same type of vulnerability as dirty gutters: moisture can become embedded and begin to penetrate your interior.

Wood splitting on window trim, likely due to aging paint and freeze/thaw stress
Wood splitting on window trim, likely due to aging paint and freeze/thaw stress

The unfortunate result of interior moisture – even if it is not sufficient to create a noticeable leak – is the likely growth of mold and mildew.  Mold and mildew spores are microscopic, airborne, and omnipresent: it is not possible to rid your home of them completely.  They will not grow, however, unless they have a constant source of moisture and food.  While the cold winter temperatures are also prohibitive of mold growth, your climate-controlled interior is probably kept at a great  temperature for mold to bloom, and the slow infiltration of moisture through damaged trim of a compromised roofline create the ideal balance of moisture for them to start digesting your wood and drywall.  If unchecked, mold causes structural damage and can create health complications, and it requires complete removal of that section of your interior in order to destroy.

A simpler solution, therefore, is to get your gutters cleaned, your roofline inspected, and your window trim replaced and repainted before the freeze-thaw cycle starts.  Contact Blue Door Painters for a free estimate.

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The Business Cycle for the Savvy Customer

Understanding the life cycle of your painting company’s workflow may be helpful in allowing you to be a strategic consumer.  There are times of year when all the painting and decorating companies in the Washington, DC/Northern Virginia area are up to their ears in business, so when you schedule a job you’ll get a long wait time and a foreman who is thinking about six other things.  There are other times of year when you’ll be close to the only customer, and you’ll have the company’s undivided attention.

The critical facts that you need to know are:

Paint can’t dry when it’s cold and wet.  Modern paint involves an incredibly complex series of sequential chemical reactions: while you think it’s just sitting there drying on the wall, it is actually bonding together to form an impenetrable, sealed coating that is chemically different than the liquid that the painter initially applied (and you thought it was boring watching paint dry!).  In order to perform this magic trick, certain chemicals mixed into the paint need to evaporate.  The problem?  When it is cold, the air cannot hold very much moisture, so evaporation does not occur.  And when it is wet, the air is already full of moisture, so it can’t take any more.  Paint, therefore, does not dry when it is cold and wet.  What that means for your painting company, is that no exterior jobs can be taken during the late fall, winter, or early spring.

Exterior paint needs warm, dry conditions to cure.
Exterior paint needs warm, dry conditions to cure.

– Wet paint needs to be ventilated.  Painters could just decide to work exclusively indoors, if it weren’t for another important fact about paint: it needs to be ventilated while drying.  While the paint manufacturing industry has come up with incredible improvements in removing VOCs from paint and generally going green, there is still 24 hours following the paint’s application where adequate ventilation is ideal for both the indoor air quality and the even drying of the paint itself.  However, most homeowners don’t want to have a door open and a fan blowing in the winter.

Given those facts, you can watch the business cycle of a painting company start to ramp up in the spring, although it’s touch and go with exterior work until the rains clear.  Then in the summer into early fall, painting companies are swamped.  Finally, as the air gets cooler, the business just dies, fading to a tiny trickle.

However, weather in Washington, DC and Northern Virginia is highly unpredictable.  While sometimes the cold hits in November and stays through March, we also have warm days in November and December during some years – other years, we have warm spells showing up randomly all winter long.  If you pay attention to the weather, you can schedule painting work in the late fall or early winter, and have the companies all to yourself.  Many companies even offer discounts for scheduling work during their low season.  Similarly, if your family takes a trip during the winter, that could be a perfect time for a major interior job: the workers will be better able to create the necessary ventilation in your absence, and you will have a company that is highly focused and grateful for the job.