by Cheryl Cruz

Created on: June 25, 2008   Last Updated: June 26, 2008

After weeks of debating with yourself, you finally decided to use your oh-so-precious day-off to fix your room that is practically crying to be repainted. Being the stingy-or economical, as you'd rather be called-person as you are, you decided to do the job yourself instead of hiring someone to do it for you. Dressed in your most ragged clothing and armed with buckets or paint and brushes of all types, you attacked the room and painted like there's no tomorrow. At the day you take a step back and admired your masterpiece. You congratulate yourself for a job well done. Not bad for a beginner.

However, at closer inspection, there in the middle of your wall, a small bubble has formed, blemishing your otherwise perfect work of art. How dare it appear on your wall! The perfectionist in you pushed you to burst ugly bubble and remove it from your wall forever. But to your horror, the paint on the sides of the bubble peeled and wet paint inside it dripped on your wall all over again,threatening to ruin your work as a whole. You tried to remedy it by painting over the blotched area but it only made things worse. The damage has been done and you have to do the wall all over again. A day's worth of salary, effort and time has been put to waste. Well, so much for saving and perfection.

To avoid more careless mistakes like this, the logical side of your brain forced you to read on painting and here are the commmon painting problems, with corresponding solution, that you found out.

Peeling is often the result of painting over wet or moist surfaces. The moisture within the area to be painted pushed its way out causing the paint to peel. Painting over dirty or glossy surfaces could also be a cause of peeling. Peeling can be avoided by using latex primer and paint because it allows moisture to pass through the paint. Surfaces must be first cleaned and scraped with wire brushes before painting.

Alligatoring as the name suggests, alligatoring is a condition wherein the paint film resembles that of an alligator skin. It occurs because the topcoat is unable to bond smoothly with the coat beneath it, either because the paint used are not compatible or consequent coating was applied before he first has dried. To solve this, scrape off the old paint, sand, prime and repaint the surface with coats.

Blistering is the formation of bubbles or pimples on the painted surface. Too much heat or too much moisture could cause blistering. To fix this, burst the bubble, sand the surface and repaint over it.

For most of us normal people who worry about our day-to-day living, repainting the house is the least of our worries. However, if seeemingly insignificant things such as cracked paints will be ignored, it might be the cause of a bigger problem such as paint failure in the whole house. By then, you will need more than a day-off and a day's worth of salary to fix it.

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