Painters are really only interested in painting your walls and ceilings and woodwork. Any furniture that comes between them and the wall, will be carefully shoved in the middle of the room and covered with a drop cloth.
The most effective and considerate preparation you can do before your painter arrives is to pack up any nick nacks loose on the top. Painters can slide a cabinet filled with Wedgewood away from the wall but they will not empty it, so please secure anything valuable or precious.
Make Safe Small Fragile Objects
If the whole house isn’t being painted, move fragiles out. Tape plastic dust sheets over extremely valuable furniture to keep paint spatter free.
Neither of these things is necessary! Dust sheets are always used and furniture can be moved. However you know how valuable your things are to you. If a precious something may be damaged, put it out of harms way.
Packing things in boxes isn’t usually necessary but it can help. Many clients take this opportunity to pack things safely out of the way, then spring clean and sort them before bringing them back for display in their new décor.
Cleaning Before the Painters Come
Painters are not cleaners. They prepare the surfaces they are going to paint. Any other surfaces near by are not touched. To get the smoothest finish from any painter, vacuum up any build ups of dust around carpeted skirtings and halls, before the painter arrives.
There are holes or cracks to be filled, they’ll use a powder filler that requires sanding when it hardens. Woodwork is lightly sanded before being painted. If paintwork is peeling or cracked, a good scrape and some heavy sanding may be required. Painters preparation makes lots of mess.
So it must sound silly to talk about cleaning before the painter comes! But painters love to do a good job for you. They don’t usually bring their own vacuum cleaner. They will just just brush the dust away from skirting edges and a light breeze can then blow it back on the finish as the paint dries.
When they make a mess they clean up their mess, that’s just the mess they make. The less dust when they start, the less likely it is that it will stick to your paint.
Scraping Glass Window Edges
If you bought an old house with an amateur messy paint job around glass edges on windows, use a flat edge razor blade scraper to clean up the glass surface. These cost very little and are also great for cleaning tiles after the painter is done.
The painter will not clean up old cutting lines on glass unless asked to as part of the quote. They will cut a fine line to the crease and any old mistakes and bad cutting from previous jobs will continue to show.
Cleaning the glass up after its been painted is ok, but the new seal should touch the glass slightly. If the old paint is scraped from the glass before the painter comes, the new cutting line is easy to see and will better protect your woodwork with a good seal between glass and frame.