Painting evolutions in custom home building

Modern Day Construction for custom homes                      Part 5

In today’s modern world of construction things are changing year to year faster than they did decade to decade in any other previous time period. In this multi part series I will traverse through an entire house starting with the foundation and working my way up to the roof and then to the finishing’s. I will explain what has changed in the last twenty years in custom home building.

One thing that you should be able to take away from this is how important it is to not just hire the right general contractor to build your custom home but how important it is to hire one that is up on today’s building methods.

Here are some changes that have come along in the last 20 years alone;

Painting

Twenty years ago, most paint was the same, it just depended on how many coats you wanted to apply and the colour you wanted.

Today paint has reached a whole different level. The most popular paint now is LoVo paint. That means that the paint is made so that there is no chemical off-gassing. There are a lot of paints that are now environmentally friendly not just LoVo. LoVo stands for Low Volatile Organic Compounds; this basically means that there is little or no off gassing of harmful chemicals into the air inside and outside of your home. This is good for the air quality in your new home and the overall environment outside of your home.

Paint can be bought at such a high quality now that a lot of times you only have to apply one coat to change the colour of a wall, as long as the existing colour is not to dark or bold.

There are now specific paint for specific rooms in the house. For example; there is paint that is made just for bathrooms. It has been engineered to withstand moisture and eliminate the growth of mold and mildew. This will help eliminate paint cracking and peeling because of high moisture from showers in the bathrooms.

Other wall treatments that have made significant strides in the last two decades are things like wallpaper and boarders. Wallpaper now comes with the glue already applied. All you have to do is wet it and apply it to the wall. The imagery on wallpaper and borders is impressive as well with most pictures and scenes looking like they came right out of a movie. Wallpaper scenes that stretch across an entire wall almost look seamless today and the choices have grown exponentially with all genres being available. 

Most custom painting is still applied the same way that it was two decades ago with painters rolling it on and doing detail work by hand. Most primer though is applied by sprayer, allowing a painting contractor the ability to prime a whole house in a single day.

The amount of companies that are making paint today and the wide variety of different colours and types that you can buy are almost mind boggling. It is very easy to be overwhelmed with paint choices in today’s marketplace.

Custom homes are still primed and then painted with at least 2 coats of paint, usually when dealing with a higher upscale clientele there ends up being 3 coats to help give the home that deep rich colour feeling.

Look for part 6 coming soon...

Rob Abbott

Operations Manager

Village Builders Inc.