The process of painting walls and installing countertops in a home can be quite extensive, especially if you don’t have previous experience.
You’ll want to make sure they’re done in the proper order to save you and your team a great deal of grief in touch-ups and repairs. While some home installations and renovations can be done in any preferred order, this certainly isn’t one of them.
You should always install countertops before painting their surrounding walls when possible. This will ensure that any damages caused during the installation process have minimal repercussions because the walls have not been painted prior to the process. If you paint the walls first, you’ll have to fix the paint and possibly repair the wall for a cohesive look again.
Read on for more information regarding the process of events for wall painting and countertop installation. We’ll also answer other common questions, such as whether you should paint cabinets or replace countertops first.
Wall or Countertops First?
While it might be tempting to paint a home’s walls first to ensure no paint damages or needs to be removed from the installed countertops, this isn’t the recommended chain of events.
It’s always best to install countertops prior to any final wall preparations, such as painting or wallpaper applications. This is to eliminate the chances of the paint needing touch-ups after the countertop is installed.
Although professional teams take extreme care not to damage any features in a home when installing a countertop, these are extremely large pieces that can also be quite heavy, and therefore, difficult to maneuver. As a result, it’s not uncommon for the countertop to potentially scrape, puncture, or dig into surrounding walls during installation.
If you have just finished painting these walls, you’ll have to touch them up or even repair sections of the wall that have been damaged during the countertop installation. Considering most modern countertops are made from granite, quartz, marble, or some other stone, it’s much easier to clean them of errant paint than to repair and touch up an adjacent wall.
Tips for Making Sure You Don’t Damage Newly Installed Countertops When Painting
Painting can be a messy process, especially if you’re painting a fairly large room that has numerous features you need to paint around delicately.
It’s usually easy to remove typical wall paint from countertops, particularly if they’re made of stone. However, if a homeowner has requested a natural wood countertop or another porous material, random flecks or large drops of paint could easily stain and smear the countertop, which could potentially cause permanent damage.
To prevent this, here are some tips for limiting the spray of wall paint during application and ensuring you don’t have to clean large paint globs off of a newly installed countertop.
Cover the Countertop with Tape and Plastic
This is the first step any renovator or painter should do before they even consider opening a can of paint.
The best way to ensure an easy clean-up and prevent any wall paint from landing on countertops is to tape around its borders with painter’s tape and then cover the countertop’s surface with a plastic sheet or drop cloths.
You can even use the painter’s tape to tape the plastic sheet to the countertop or adjourning features, guaranteeing it won’t accidentally come off during the painting process.
Use Proper Painting Technique
The more you flourish your paintbrush or use brusque, quick motions, the more likely you’ll spray flecks of paint around the room and potentially onto the countertops. Avoid this by utilizing proper painting techniques.
Whether you’re using a paintbrush or roller, the first step to proper painting technique is to make sure you don’t overload your tool with paint. Lightly submerge or roll it in the wall paint of choice and then eliminate and excess paint before applying it to the wall. The tool should be saturated with paint but not dripping.
Once you’ve started painting, make sure you keep a wet edge (meaning you work quickly enough that any paint applied is always applied on top of wet paint) and apply the paint smoothly with minimal pressure. Excess pressure will increase the chances of paint running down the side of your wall until it comes into contact with another surface where it can pool, such as the floor or the countertop.
Overall, the key here is to work quickly and efficiently with light pressure, the proper tools, and minimal amounts of paint. You can always add coats, as necessary.
Make Sure Your Tools Match the Task
Technique is an important element of any painting task, but it becomes considerably more difficult to maintain if you use the wrong tool.
When painting around or near a home’s countertops, it’s important to match the proper tool with the section you’re painting. For instance, if you’re painting a large slab of a wall next to the counter, you can use a long-handled roller, as there’s little risk of you spraying or dripping paint on the countertops.
However, if you’re painting directly around or even above the countertops, you should use an angled brush. Having the countertop taped and covered will certainly help here as well, but it’s still possible for amounts to pool around or under cracks in the tape if you aren’t careful.
A smaller, angled brush will give you more control in smaller spaces, particularly between the countertop and features installed above, such as cabinets.
Should You Paint Cabinets or Replace Countertops First?
As opposed to the previous debate of wall painting or countertop installation first, you have a bit more room for preference here.
Those who like to verge on the side of caution will typically replace a countertop before painting cabinets for the same reason you would install countertops before painting the walls. While it’s unlikely that professional installers would damage surrounding features, like walls and countertops, accidents do happen from time to time with these jobs, and you want to reduce the potential repercussions when they do.
However, it’s more likely that a wall will get dinged than a cabinet when installing countertops, so painting them first isn’t out of the question.
In a perfect world, you would remove the cabinets and paint them in a separate space. In the meantime, while the cabinets dry, a team would install the countertops now that there’s fewer features present that could be potentially damaged in the process. When the installation is complete, you’ll re-install the freshly painted cabinets.
If you decide to be a little more daring and install the countertops first, then paint the cabinets after, we recommend using the tips previously mentioned regarding how you can limit any potential mess from the painting process so that you don’t make more work for yourself on the countertops than necessary.
Ways to Remove Paint from Countertops
Getting paint on a beautiful countertop isn’t ideal, but it can happen from time to time. When it does, it’s important to know how to safely remove it so that the paint doesn’t stain the countertop and your removal method doesn’t cause any further damage.
When a wet paper towel doesn’t do the trick, here are our recommendations for how to get paint off of a countertop, depending on its material.
| Material | Method |
| Acrylic or wood |
|
| Laminate or concrete |
|
| Marble and granite |
|
Try to refrain from using harsh tools like scrapers for as long as possible, but if the paint spot is really tough to remove, you can opt for wrapping a rag around a plastic putty knife and scraping it off using light pressure.
Contact Superior Commercial Solutions
Regardless of a home’s size or the experience level of a team, it’s always wise to take precautions when installing countertops, especially when other renovations still need to be done. Because countertops are such hefty pieces, it’s best to install them before painting walls or other features, like cabinets, in the event that these features are scraped, and their exterior paint is damaged.
For an experienced team that will make sure to get a job like this one done properly, call Superior Commercial Solutions. We use reputable products and efficient processes to ensure you’re getting quality work at a rate that fits into your business budget, and we work on projects across the United States. Contact SCS today.
Sources:
https://activerain.com/blogsview/5456035/should-you-paint-cabinets-or-replace-countertops-first-
https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-paint-a-room-1824814
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/paint-between-kitchen-cabinets-countertop-28232.html
https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/paint-roller-techniques-and-tips/
https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/how-to-remove-paint-from-everything-48451
https://housetrick.com/how-to-remove-paint-from-countertops/