Paint a room in a weekend

Saturday morning: clear, wash, fill

Empty the room properly rather than pushing everything into the middle. A room with furniture in the centre has a working ring around the walls about a metre wide, and a metre is not enough space to stand back and look at what you have just done. If something genuinely cannot leave, get it into the middle and cover it, but treat that as the exception.

Wash the walls. This is the stage people skip and the one that decides how the paint sits. Kitchen and hallway walls in particular carry a film that is invisible until paint refuses to key to it. A weak solution of sugar soap or ordinary detergent, a sponge, and a second pass with clean water is enough. Let it dry fully; a wall that feels cool to the back of the hand is still wet.

Fill while the walls are drying. Dents, old fixing holes and the ragged edge where a skirting meets a wall all take filler. Work it slightly proud of the surface, because filler sinks a little as it dries and a flush fill becomes a shallow dip. Leave the fill to harden for as long as the packet asks before you touch it again.

Saturday afternoon: sand, mask, cut in

Sand the filler back level with a fine abrasive on a block. The block matters: fingers follow the hollow and sand the surrounding wall as well, which turns a small repair into a wide shallow crater. Run a hand over the wall with the lights off and a lamp held low against the surface, and the ridges you missed will throw shadows.

Vacuum the dust off the wall and the floor. Dust is the reason a first coat can feel gritty, and a gritty first coat means sanding again between coats.

Mask only what you actually need. Skirtings, architraves and the edge of a ceiling that is staying are worth taping. Sockets and switch plates are worth loosening and easing away from the wall rather than taping around, but only with the circuit isolated at the consumer unit, and only if you are comfortable doing so. If you are not, tape them and move on.

Cut in the edges with an angled brush. Load the brush about a third of the way up the bristles and knock off the excess against the side of the tin rather than dragging it across the rim. Lay the paint on a couple of centimetres from the edge, then bring it up to the line in one steady pass. Keep the cut-in band wide enough for the roller to overlap it later, roughly five centimetres, and work in stretches short enough that the edge is still wet when the roller arrives.

Sunday morning: the first coat

Roll in sections about a metre square. Start slightly away from the wet cut-in edge, spread the paint out with a few passes, then finish with light strokes that run floor to ceiling in one direction. Finishing all the sections the same way is what stops the wall reading as a patchwork in low light.

Do not try to make the first coat cover. A first coat that has been worked hard to hide the wall underneath is a thick coat, and thick coats dry unevenly, sag at the edges and take far longer to harden. Two thin coats will always look flatter than one heavy one.

Leave the recoat time the tin asks for, and treat it as a minimum rather than a target. A room that is cold or still damp from washing will need longer than the tin assumes.

Sunday afternoon: second coat and reinstating

Cut in again before rolling again, in the same order as the day before. The second cut-in is quicker because the line is already established and you are following it rather than finding it.

Roll the second coat the same way, in the same finishing direction. Resist going back over an area that has started to set; the roller will lift it rather than smooth it and leave a scuffed patch that only shows up once the room is back together.

Pull the tape while the paint is dry to the touch but not hard. Pull it back on itself at a shallow angle and slowly. Tape removed days later takes the paint edge with it, and tape removed while the paint is genuinely wet lets the line run.

Put the room back in the evening if you can, and give the walls a day before anything leans against them. Paint is touch dry long before it is hard, and the mark left by a sofa pushed back too early is permanent in practice.