Time saver paint tricks. Spray it on.

Pre-painting molding is almost never a time-saver. It usually costs time. And aggravation.

But, there’s one place pre-painting molding puts all kinds of speed and time back in your day, and that’s shoe molding.

Shoe molding is very difficult to paint once it’s installed. It’s ON the floor, for one thing, which means you have to be a contortionist to get the paint brush from the can to the work and cut a nice line. And, if there’s carpet involved, it almost never goes well.

What we do to short circuit this tied-in-knots home improvement headache and let the paint be a time saver is set our shoe molding up outdoors on sawhorses and pre-paint it. And since it’s equally frustrating to paint tiny twigs of molding sagging between sawhorses with a paint brush as it is to paint it inside the house, we use spray paint. We apply two quick coats to make sure we cover all the edges and let them dry.

Next, we install the shoe, fill the nail holes, wet-sand them, then apply a final coat of paint with a brush that we try to get as close to the floor as possible without going crazy.

The reason pre-painting works here as a time saver—and doesn’t for bigger, more visible moldings—is that we use brad nails (smaller than regular nails), the molding is significantly smaller, and vastly more out of view.

We also spray-paint highly detailed crown molding in place. We use an air mover to evacuate paint from the room to keep odors down in the rest of the home. It sets up like a factory finish and enables us to detail all the nooks and crannies that would befuddle a brush.

Do you have any time saver tricks? We’d love to see. Send us a note, a message on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter.

Mark

A licensed contractor, tool expert, wood and outdoor enthusiast, and elite Spartan Race competitor, he writes about home improvement and tools for national magazines and websites, and teaches hands-on clinics for other remodeling professionals. Check out his book, The Carpenter's Notebook.

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