My name is Craig Armstrong and I’ll be coming over to your place for the estimate.
First off, thank you for booking an estimate with CAM Painters! We certainly appreciate the opportunity to give you a painting or wallpapering estimate for your home!
Here’s what you can expect:
We’ll arrive on time, time is valuable and you don’t want to waste it waiting around for someone to show up.
We’ll take off our shoes when we’re in your home.
We’ll ask specific questions so that we can customize the level of prep, and scope of work to your needs.
You’ll receive a detailed written quote – so you know exactly what you’re getting if you decide to move forward with our services.
Here’s how you can make our job easier:
Before we arrive make a list of all the areas you would like painted or wallpapered.
Go over this list with your spouse, or anyone else involved in the decision making process.
If there is more than one person involved in the decision making process, see if they can be at the estimate as well. That way, if they have any questions I can address these directly which saves us all time and eliminates any misunderstanding.
Thanks again for booking an estimate with CAM Painters, I look forward to meeting you!
The mark of a great paint job for your Toronto home is straight, sharp lines. This can be beneficial if you are doing stripes on a wall, or just want a clean line between walls and ceiling.
Many times when we are painting, we will do our “cut” lines freehand, just following the corner between the wall and, or the groove between trim and wall. However, there are many situations where a professional painter needs tape to ensure a clean sharp cut line.
Here are a list of best practices to get the sharpest line possible.
Select a good painter’s tape
The beige tape is not painter’s tape. Beige tape is too sticky and usually peels paint off the surface.
This particular tape is usually green or blue and is clearly labeled “painter’s tape”. The best is Frog Tape, but it’s one of the most costly painters tape as well.
Apply the tape correctly
Even if a high quality painter’s tape is used all is for nought if it’s not applied correctly. If the edges aren’t properly sealed then paint will seep underneath the tape and wreck any possibility of a sharp straight line.
How do you seal the edges of the tape?
If you are using Frog Tape, you have to make sure that the edge is firmly pressed down. Either use your finger and run it along the edge of the tape, or some people will use a plastic putty knife and run that along the edge of the tape. Once that’s done there should be no paint seeping under the tape and you’ll get a sharp line.
If you have an ordinary painter’s tape a sharp line can still be achieved. Once again, firmly press the tape down, either with your finger or a plastic putty knife. However, an extra step after this is needed to ensure that the edge is properly sealed, this can take the form of:
a thin bead of caulking along the edge of the tape
some of the base colour along the edge of the tape
a clear flat varnish along the edge of the tape
Any of these methods will seal the edge of the tape.
Removing the tape
Either remove the tape right after you paint, or wait until the paint is fully dry. If the paint is partially dry it can lift off the surface.
How you remove the tape is important as well:
go slowly
keep the tape at an obtuse angle, ie. close to the surface as you pull
There you have it! Clean beautiful paint lines!
If you’d rather leave the clean, beautiful paint lines to the professionals why don’t you book a quote? We’d be happy to Transform Your Home With Lasting Beauty!
Oops, young Johnny was playing hockey indoors and shot a puck into the wall of your Toronto home, and has left you with a hole in your drywall!
You hosted a Super Bowl 2017 party with some die-hard Atlanta Falcons fans, and the brunt of their frustrations ended up on a 1’x1′ section of wall. You sigh, knowing that you needed some work done anyway. The roof has needed a roofing Aurora company to take a look at it for a while anyway, but now you’ve got another job that needs patching up around the home.
What are you going to do? Do you have to hire two different contractors; a handyman to patch the hole and a painter to paint the wall after the patch?
Actually, CAM Painters can fix that hole in your drywall and then paint your whole house from top to bottom after! Or we can just repaint the wall that had the hole in it.
If you want your whole house drywalled your better to get a specialist in, but it’s hard to get a drywall contractor in for one patch. My rule of thumb is that if the repair is less than the size of a sheet of drywall you’re far better off hiring one contractor to do both patch and paint, rather than deal with two contractors.
What’s our process for drywall repairs?
First order of business, we want to keep dust to a minimum. Drywall patching requires sanding patching compound around the edge of the repairs. There are a few ways we use to minimize dust:
We drape plastic on door openings to minimize dust travelling from one room to another.
We apply our patching compound as smooth as possible. If the patching compound lumpy more sanding needs to be done than if the compound is smooth to start with.
We use sanders that hook up to HEPA filter vacuums, so that less dust gets into the atmosphere in the first place.
We also ensure that the repaired area is reinforced to prevent future damage. This involves putting wood strapping behind the repair for extra support if necessary. We want to make sure that we give the best possible service to our customers so we like to take a look at what we do each time and see where we can secure the 100%, for instance, we have work vehicles that we use to transport our equipment and ourselves to the designated area, so it is important that we make sure our vehicles have, at the very least, cheap business van insurance, as well as insure what is within the van in case of any incidents or issues so we are covered in any and all eventualities in our line of work.
How do we ensure that you have a great painting experience for your Toronto home? We have a system to hire and train painters who, as a result, will give you a great painting experience!
Before the interviews
Before we start the interview process we advertise through multiple avenues to make sure we have a good supply of candidates. We also network through social media and our spheres of influence to see if any potential candidates can be found there. There are some businesses that use resources such as peakpeo.com to find their candidates but you’ll mostly find our advertisements in local channels and our social media platforms. Our hiring philosophy is that we want more candidates than we need so that we can choose the best. In fact, we like to go through at least 40 candidates to find one hire.
At the interview
When we interview we not only focus on technical knowledge we focus on character. In fact, during the interview 90% of our questions deal with character and 10% focus on technical knowledge. Why, you ask? Technical knowledge can be trained, but character cannot.
We want you to feel comfortable with the painters working in your home and hiring for character is the main way we ensure you have a great painting experience.
After the interview
Candidates that we think could be a good fit are called back. Are they immediately offered a position? NO! We call to let them know that we are going to be checking their references. We check 3 references for each potential candidate. Anyone can say good things about themselves on an interview, but it carries more weight when others can say good things about you as well.
We realize that our fine painters are going to be working in your home and we do not want you to feel unsure about the person walking in to your home to do renovations. So as an extra precaution, we tend to do a criminal background check along with drug and health verification of our employees. This kind of background checks are a great way of making sure a business knows exactly who to employ, in compliance with the company policy. Not to mention, these checks could also help employers protect their reputation by creating safe work environments for other workers and clients. Using someone like this Illinois background check company could ensure that only reliable employees are hired. We want you to have complete peace of mind while we are working in your home.
The orientation process
Once we decide to take on a new painter the process is just starting. We have specific ways and systems for doing things, so even an experienced painter will need training in these areas.
For example, we use project management software and apps to make sure that the job runs smoothly and that no detail is missed. So a new hire needs to get up to speed with that.
Also, our new hires are placed with more seasoned staff, so that they can get used to our processes and methodologies.
Some closing thoughts on painter hiring…
We are committed to giving our customer a great painting experience, so this mission guides us and influences who we hire and how we train. We want you to be comfortable with who is working in and around your home and we want to train painters to give you the best experience possible.
Why don’t you book a quote? We’d love to Transform Your Home With Lasting Beauty!
Many paints are advertised as paint and primer in one, however there are still situations where you’ll want to use a separate primer for your Toronto home, we’ll go through them in detail here…
If you have a glossy floor and you put a cloth on top of it, slides easily, doesn’t it?
Put that same cloth on top of a slab of unfinished concrete, doesn’t slide so easy, right?
It’s analogous to paint:
Paint has trouble adhering to glossy surfaces, so there needs to be an intermediate step. We accomplish this by deglossing the surface by sanding, by priming the surface with a high adhesion primer, or by doing both. This is especially necessary when dealing with oil paint, so please read:
Many stains will bleed through latex paint, so a stain sealer is needed. Stains include pen marks (shame on you for drawing on your walls), mildew, water stains, knots in wood, nicotine, etc. A good shellac-based primer will seal these monstrosities out and allow you to topcoat with your choice of paint. One of our favorite shellac-based primer/sealers is Zinsser BIN, it’s like the Buckley’s of paint, “it smells awful, but it works!” Please use a respirator with shellac-based paint
Big Colour Changes
There are high-hide primers that streamline the task of big colour changes. If you are going from a mid-tone colour to an off-white using a high-hiding white primer is a great idea. High-hiding primer is cheaper than most finish coats, and it hides better than most finish coats.
Conversely, If you are painting a deep or intense colour, getting a grey primer will make the job that much easier. A good paint store will be able to advise you what shade of grey to use under the finish coat.
Porous Surfaces
A primer will soak into a surface better than a finish coat, so it’s advised to use a primer over new drywall and new drywall patch. Too often finish coat won’t penetrate deep enough into a drywall patch and that area will end up peeling over time, so if we use primer we can prevent that.
Are there any situations where I can use a “paint and primer in one” product?
Sure, if the surface is
clean
not too glossy
there’s not a big colour change
no stains
not much patching – maybe a couple of nail holes and that’s it
If this sounds like your painting project then a “paint and primer in one” product is a great choice.
