Atlanta Painting

You know the dry bitterness that you taste from chewing a grape skin or the dry feeling in your mouth after you drink a glass of wine?  That is caused by tannins.

Wood also has tannins, but since normal people don’t chew a lot of wood, you don’t notice them…Until they bleed through your paint!  This is called “Tannin Bleed.”

Tannins are poly phenols found in most all plants.  I’m not sure what the plants use them for, but I’m sure they have a purpose.  This is not a horticulture lesson, it is about painting in Atlanta.

How to prevent tannin bleed when painting new wood:

1) You must prime any new wood that you paint, or else you are asking for unsightly tannin bleed.

2) The primer which you use is also very important.  I do NOT recommend using a waterborne primer.  Although, many say that they work for new wood, I have seen them fail numerous times.  Use either an alkyd primer or a shellac based primer.  Examples of alkyd primers wood primers are SW A-100 exterior oil wood primer or Zinsser’s Coverstain.  Both of these products work very well, especially the A-100.  If you want to use a shellac based primer, I like Zinsser’s BIN primer.  It is a true shellac and has always fixed even the most stubborn tannin bleed.

3) Either prime the entire piece of wood or spot prime the knots, as they are the most prone to bleed.  GreenWave Solutions primes the entire piece of wood because this yields the best Atlanta painting.

4) Wait for the primer to dry, per the label, and top coat the wood.  This should prevent any tannin bleed on you newly painted wood.

5) If you have previously painted wood where the tannin bleed has already occurred, spot prime the areas that are bleeding and repaint them.

Choosing an Atlanta Painter can be a daunting and frustrating chore.  With the high volume of Atlanta painting companies, all claiming to be the best, how do select a reputable one?

Before I started GreenWave Solutions, I worked as an independent contractor for several of Atlanta’s larger paint contracting companies.  I will not name these companies because disparaging your competition is not a positive way to do business.  While I worked with these Atlanta paint contractors, I witnessed practices that weren’t just bad business practices, but completely unethical.

One company, which had been in business for fewer than 2 years, would train its estimators to tell perspective clients they had been in business for 7.  I wasn’t sure if there is any way to verify how long a company was in business, but either way it is wrong.

Several large paint contractors in Atlanta offer a 5-year warranty.  None of these companies have been it business for five years, however.  The warranty was seemed wide open and to good to be true.  I asked one of the owners what was going to happen in 4 years when warranty work became relevant, how he was going to service all of the warranty work.  His response was, “You don’t.  You close down the business and open up another company with a different name.”  I was stunned.  I didn’t work with either of these companies much longer after this.

Another contractor that I worked with was a master of deception.  He spends outrageous amounts of money every month for search engine optimization(SEO).  SEO is getting your website to appear as high as possible on Google, Yahoo, etc.  He spends more money a month on SEO than he does on paint.  He has no knowledge of paint and simply collects leads from his internet marketing campaign.  I have to compliment his SEO because he is consistantly the 1st or 2nd result 0n all “Atlanta, Alpharetta, Roswell painter or painting” keyword searches.  This company doesn’t even carry insurance for his company.   He requires his subs or estimators to carry general liability for themselves.  When customers ask for Workers’ Comp, he has some rhetoric about how workers’ comp is not really important for residential work.  I worked with him for nearly two months and I don’t think he saw one job that his company completed.

Other painters do things like tell the customer that they are getting Duration ($40/gallon) and really use A-100 ($16/gallon).

Here are a few steps you can take to protect yourself from “shady” paint contractors:

1.  Get a copy of their insurance certificate.  They should have General Liability and Workers’ Comp.  Call and make sure that the policies are real and up to date.  Many guys forge these documents.

2.  Don’t assume that positive reviews and testimonials are real.  If you use Kudzu.com or read Google reviews, read several reviews and look to see if there is very similar verbage in many reviews.  If you hire a search SEO company to help your website rank in the search engines, they actually will go to Google, Kudzu, Yahoo, etc. and write fake reviews about how great a contractor is.  Look at the reviewer and how many reviews they have written.  Most of them have 1 review only for that company.

3.  Ask specifically what coatings are going to be used on your project.  If you are unsure that they are using the products they say, ask to see invoices from the paint store.

4.  Don’t be shy to ask for references.  Remember that references can be faked.

5.  Ask the contractor how/where they were trained on paint coatings and the application of these coatings.

6.  Trust your instints.  If you have an uneasy feeling about any part of the estimating process, listen to your gut and get another estimate.

7.  Call GreenWave Solutions.  We are proud of our crews, estimators, and work.  We are honest, hard working, and strive to provide Atlanta with a “white-collar” painting contractor.

I am going to keep an ongoing list of common paint terms that that you will see me use on this website.  I know that I am not going to be able to put all of the words on here at once, so this will be a article that I update as I add content.  I will often use coatings instead of paints.  Coatings refers to all paints, primers, epoxies, urethane, etc.  All paints are coatings, but not all coatings are paints.

Common Paint Terms:

• Substrate - The surface that is being painted.
• Coverage - How many square feet one gallon of the coating can cover.
• Hide - How well the paint hides(covers) existing colors.  Oftentimes people confuse hide with coverage.
• Blocking - How well a paint resists sticking to itself.  For instance, when a cabinet door sticks to the frame or a window is difficult to open because the paint sticks.
• Adhesion - How well a coating sticks to substrates.
• Durability - How well a paint holds up to abuse.
• Washability and Scrubability - Refers to how much rubbing a coating can take before it fails.

Common paint failures and their causes:

• Peeling - Self explanatory.  Causes include adhesion problems, poor prep, moisture, and more!
• Burnishing - Refers to a paint’s sheen being changed due to rubbing, washing, etc.

• Hat Banding or Picture Framing - This is when the brush cut-in shows a different color than the rolled parts of a wall.
• Holidays - These are areas where the paint was not applied thick enough the original substrate is visible through the paint.
• Flashing - When you paint over drywall mud or caulk and the paint sheen is different when it dries.
• Alligatoring - Severe paint cracking that looks like the skin of an alligator - various causes.
• Mudcracking - When paint is applied too thick or on a hot surface and dries to quickly.  It cracks and looks like one of those deserts where the ground is cracked.
• Efflorescence - A white powdery substance that comes through paint if it is applied to fresh masonry without the appropriate primer.
• Surfactant Leaching - Occurs when a paint is exposed to excessive moisture before its initial has happened.  It appears in the form of a white soapy goo coming out of the painted surface.

Common Solvents used for thinning and cleaning coatings:

• Water
• Mineral spirits/Paint thinner
• Lacquer thinner
• Xylene
• Denatured Alcohol
• Toluene
• Methyl-Ethyl-Ketone (MEK)
• Acetone
• Reducer 54 (RK7-54)

Keep checking back.  I will continually update this list as I write more.

Remember, don’t trust anyone to do your Atlanta painting.  Call GreenWave Solutions.  We are Atlanta’s First Green Painter and the best painters in Atlanta!