How to Paint the Outside of a House with a Spray Gun

*This post was sponsored by Wagner Spray Tech.  A huge thank you to them for helping me support my blog.  I only work with products and companies I truly believe in and use.*

Oh. My. Gosh.  My dear friends, this post has been a long, long time in the making….a month to be exact! We have been working hard on this exterior project for a long time, fixing up our exterior siding, fixing areas that had weathered too much over the years, and finally giving the entire exterior a new coat of paint, and the house, a whole new lease on life! Today I want to share with you how to paint the outside of a house with a spray gun and how much time and money it can save your to do it yourself!

Now, I want to be very clear right here at the beginning.  I had some help to finish this huge project.  We hired a painting company to paint the larger part of my home, where the eaves are too tall, 26 feet tall to be exact.  I just couldn’t do it all on my own.  

But, I knew that I could do some of it, and I wanted to save some money so I took on our breezeway and the garage.  I want to show you how I painted the outside of our house with a spray gun and how helpful it can actually be to use one!

The very first thing we needed to do was to choose paint colors.  I spend so much time worrying over this.  For a while, I was just going to repaint it all white.  Then I decided to do a two toned style, with a dark garage and breezeway and a White House.  

We also decided to paint the dark soffit and fascia white to brighten it all up.  (at one point I was considering painting it all dark, but my husband and I just couldn’t agree on this).  I also decided to paint my rain gutters a gorgeous copper color to give them all an update as well!

I wanted something different and I knew it would turn out amazing!

Before we started any painting, there was a lot of work that needed to be done.  Over the past 11 years, the snow has settled in some valleys on our roof and had rotted some of our wood siding.  We found ourselves replacing some of them.  I have to give a huge shout out to my husband, who tirelessly worked all month replacing, caulking and sanding planks of siding.  He really gave our siding so many more years of life doing this. 

This is an important first step when planning to paint the outside of a house.  You want the foundation to be sure and solid.  Once all the unglamorous things were done, I still had to scrape and sand peeling paint, so that the new paint would have a smooth surface to adhere to. 

I used a multi purpose tool to scrape the peeling paint.  If we had a larger area, I would use a orbital sander to easily rid the siding of the peeling paint.  The side of our garage was the worst wall, and it needed a lot of love. The goal of repainting our wood siding is to give it another 10-15 years before we will need to replace it.  The pine tongue and groove siding was inexpensive when we built and I think we are now paying for that a bit.  But its okay, we will now get more time out of it before we will have to invest in a replacement.

Once the entire garage and breezeway had been scraped, sanded and caulked, I used my pressure washer to give the siding and soffit a thorough cleaning. 

Once the pressure washing was done, you want to let the siding dry completely. If you are planning to paint the outside of a house with a paint sprayer, you will need to do a couple steps of prep before you will be ready to paint.

For this large project we used our new Wagner Control Pro 170 airless paint sprayer.  We needed something that could handle the large project.  This paint sprayer makes it easy to paint like a pro.  I found this paint sprayer to be the perfect match for our large exterior painting project.  

Instead of filling a reservoir, like some of my Wagner sprayers, this has a pump, and it easily can spray untwined paints and stains with its durable .60 horsepower.

The HEA system’s new tip technology decreases overspray by up to 55 percent while delivering softer spray, improving control and providing a more-consistent finish.

I loved how small the amount of overspray was. I was able to spray very close to my soffit and fascia without masking off.  

How to paint the outside of the house with a spray gun:

First, we masked everything off that we did not want painted.  For the garage and breezeway that meant a couple windows, and the garage doors.  I ended up simply hand painting around the garage doors since there wasn’t much to paint anyways.  

 

We found this really great masking tape/plastic dispenser that makes it so easy to mask windows, rain gutters and more.  

I masked the windows, as well as the rock pillars on the corners of my garage. We did not mask the soffit and fascia at the top because we decided to paint about 1 foot of siding directly under the soffit by hand.  I found this worked for us because of the higher winds we experience here as well as the height of the wall we were painting.  

So, basically you need to cover anything you do not want painted.

Next, make sure everything is cleaned and prepped.

*Make sure you have proper safety goggles and a mask prior to painting.  I use both items, as well as a plastic hair cover to keep my hair protected.  You can also wear coveralls, or the plastic jumpsuits if you fear ruining your clothes.  I have painting clothes so I wasn’t worried about that.

It is then time to prime the pump, and prepare you paint sprayer to spray.  The instructions make it super easy to do this.  I have always found Wagner Paints instruction booklets really helpful and have great troubleshooting info as well.

Once I had the pump primed and ready to go, I began painting.  You can either start from the top and head down or bottom to the top.  For the wall that I am showing here, I we painted from the bottom up, so that we could see how far up we could paint before finishing off by hand.  

You want to keep the paint sprayer gun vertical and use your arm to spray left and right, giving it all an even coat.  Do not bend your wrist and paint.  This will give you uneven coats.  

Let the first coat dry before adding a second.  If you have any drips, make sure to brush them out smooth.

I am always amazed at how fast painting goes when using a paint sprayer.  There is a huge sense of satisfaction when you watch it paint large swaths in seconds. Truly such a game changer for sure.

Without this paint sprayer, I truly would not have been able to accomplish this project in a timely manner.

Now, lets just have a look at how it has turned out.  I am not sharing the entire house, because we are currently adding a couple other things to that side of the house.  So we can ooh and ahh over the rest of the house!

This paint color was quite the process to acquire.  I found a home with this paint color non Pinterest and reached out to the architect to find to the color.  They told me that the color was a custom color matched to a window! Well, hmmm. So they gave me the contact information of the Benjamin Moore store that mixed it.  

They were able to give me the exact formula, and I took it to our local Benjamin Moore store to have mixed.  The dark is called Dark Ash, but is not a color in any library, so if you are curious of the color, I can send the formula to you, but it has to be mixed by a licensed Benjamin Moore store. The white paint is White Dove, also by Benjamin Moore.

What I love about this white is that it holds its color.  Something you may not notice in exterior paint is that outside light and elements can effect the actual color.  Our previous white would pull orange and grey blue all over and looked muddy often.  This white hold true whether its sunset, sunrise or the middle of the day.

I am totally obsessed with the new and improved copper rain gutters! We are  so so so very happy that I decided to paint them.  I will be sharing that project soon as well!

The dark paint is a magical color. This is no exaggeration.  I tried about 15 different paint samples before settling on this one. It turned out to the perfect color!  This color looks almost black in the shade, but it has an almost charcoal color, but it pulls a bit brown, and a bit blue, and sometimes a but green.  It is such a warm dark color, it looks amazing in any light.  This is what I was looking for.  I love it!

Another thing that is great about this color is that it matched my current soffit and facia color.  I wanted a tone on tone look.

Since we are still working on a couple projects on the far side of the house, I wanted to try to share one of the back of the house. We have a portion of our house that pops out about 10 feet. We decided to paint it the same color as the garage, so to pull the color through to the other side of the house.

I am completely and utterly in love with the end result.  The light contrasting with the dark.  The copper rain gutters and white soffits.  Its such a huge change!

I am totally and utterly obsessed.  I could not have done with mammoth project without the use of my Wagner Paint Sprayer 

Want to see more projects using paint sprayers?  Check these out:

• How to Paint a Room with a Paint Sprayer
• How to Paint Stairs and Railings Like a Pro with Wagner Paint Sprayers
• Our DIY Greenhouse Design and Reveal
• Gorgeous Office Bookshelves with a Built In Electric Fireplace
• My Functional And Eye Catching Chicken Coop Design
• A Treehouse Design Perfect for Kids and Adults!