Your simplest course of action for painting your home is to pick great weather for your house painting. A dry, sunny day in the spring or summer will give you the most time to apply the paint and allow it to cure. It will dry and cure most effectively if you allow that to happen. However, you don’t always have the best circumstances. An unexpected cold snap can drop temperatures on your painting weekend, or you might need to spruce a home to sell in a hurry. Whatever the case may be, if you want to paint your home during cold weather, you need to be aware of a few things.
1 — Allow More Time Between Coats
For the purposes of painting, cold weather is typically anything below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. At 75 degrees Fahrenheit, a coat of latex paint requires about four hours before it can be recoated. If you are painting below 50 degrees, you should allow at least six hours before applying a new coat. If you are using an alkyd or an oil-based paint, you should allow yourself 48 hours or more before reapplying.
2 — Thinner Coats
If it is cold outside, the paint will take longer to dry. A thicker coat also takes longer to dry. If you want to reduce your drying times, try applying thinner coats of paint with each pass. That can be done by simply having less paint on the roller. Some paint sprayers allow you to actually turn down the thickness of the coat as a setting on the sprayer.
You can also choose to thin the paint with paint thinner. That will help keep paint from freezing if the temperature is below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
3 — Paint Thinner Is Your Friend
Paint thinner does more than just thin out a paint. It also acts as a kind of antifreeze for your paint. When the temperature drops below 32 degrees, the paint in your cans will begin to freeze. They’ll freeze on the surface before the bulk of the paint does. Using paint thinner will help reduce the freezing. It will also aid you in applying the thin coats that were mentioned above.
4 — Keep the Cans Warm
Freezing and thawing paint cans might result in the paint becoming lumpy or separating. That will make it more difficult to apply an even coat. If the paint has frozen and thawed too many times, it can be impossible to mix it smooth again. To avoid that, you can simply keep the paint cans warm. The simplest way to do that is by keeping them inside when you are working. Keep the cans in a garage or a shed. Pour out only the amount of paint you intend to use in the next half hour or so.