With a big new empty basement to paint, we decided to buy a paint sprayer to get the job done. We'd been thinking of doing so for a while, and thought it would make the job of painting the basement faster and easier. First, let me say that using a paint sprayer is extremely fun. Its like a giant paint marker that instantly transforms everything around you. Its like being deBlob. And, it is lightning fast. I painted all the walls in the basement in about a half an hour.
That said, they are cumbersome and extremely messy. You will get paint everywhere, especially if you are painting the ceiling like we were. I wore an outfit most closely resembling a beekeeper, and had such a thorough dusting of paint I was soon unable to see out of my goggles. Everything that happened to be in the basement at the time was covered in a thin dust of ceiling paint. the entire floor was covered as well. We thought that it didn't matter if we covered the floor or not, but this just made for more work when we went to sand it.Those lines on the floor in the picture below are from some tape that we pulled up after painting.
They are also annoying to clean. It's not that it's over complicated or necessarily difficult, but we've found that the process takes so long that it cuts into the time saved by using the sprayer in the first place. We probably should have gotten a much smaller paint sprayer, and just dealt with the frequent refilling. I'm sure the clean up would have been easier, and the process as a whole might have been a bit neater.
