Painting

Painting is a stage where inspecting the finished result tells you nothing — a wall painted with one coat on still-damp render and a wall painted with three coats on fully cured render look identical on handover day. The difference shows up in years one to three, as peeling paint, white efflorescence or mould under the fi…

• This page contains
• Before reading this page — Thai paint standards cover something different from what you think
• Is the wall ready for painting? — three checkpoints it must pass
• Number of coats — prove it by counting tins, no need to argue about how many coats
• The different-shade primer trick — making the paint layers visible to the eye
• Weather and sequence — two things that turn good paint into bad paint
• Four problems that show up later — and causes that happen before the brush touches the wall
• Steel at home — before choosing paint, find out how many metres the house is from the sea
• Whether the paint will stick is decided before the tin is opened
• Paint film thickness — the figure that ends the argument
• Galvanised steel — the word galvanised doesn't tell you the lifespan; the zinc thickness does
• Three shapes that make good paint fail fast — visible while the steel is still unpainted
• Steel that can't be reached for painting can't be maintained for the life of the house