Painting a Great Room: Do It Yourself or Don't?

With soaring 22-foot ceilings and generous square footage, this Atlanta great room's painting was best left to the pros.

To ensure a crisp, clean line around all outlets, it's important to remove all covers and switch plates from your great room walls. This is time consuming and requires safe keeping of the removed covers and their screws. Once the outlet covers are removed, the outlets themselves need to be taped off to protect them from paint. Pros often use painters tape to keep screws attached to their corresponding covers. This will make installation quick and easy once the painting is complete.

Like outlet covers, cable and phone jack plates will need to be removed from your great room walls prior to painting. This is more involved than simply removing screws to detach the cover. Once the screws are removed, the outlet covers or jack covers will need to be slid down and off from the bundled wires, and then the wires will need to be tightly wound together with zip ties and covered with plastic and painter's tape. With the wires wound together, it's easier to paint around them.

Masking off molding and casing with painter's tape is an easy task for rooms with low ceilings, but it's much more challenging in great rooms with soaring ceilings and molding only reachable with ladders. Homeowners interested in hiring out the painting of their great rooms can save on labor costs by masking off the molding and casing they can reach themselves, then leaving the higher areas to the pros. It's also best to anticipate painters charging approximately $10 for every roll of painter's tape they supply for the project.