Masking is a critical part of both interior and exterior paint preparation. Painting is messy work, and paint can and will get onto anything that’s not covered! The techniques for masking are the same whether you’re working indoors or out, with one major exception: when applying exterior paint with a sprayer, extra precautions must be taken.

The time put into masking is worth effort for many reasons.

1. Masking enables a painting novice to look like a pro. You don’t have to master fantastic cutting-in skills. You can use tape to keep lines straight and keep paint where it belongs.
2. Masking reduces clean up time. It takes far more time to clean up paint that ends up where it doesn’t belong, than it takes to prevent the paint from getting there in the first place. For example, masking off windows with tape and plastic protects them from paint spatter. This saves hours with a razor blade scraping up paint dots. Besides, you don’t want to be scraping windows with an e-glaze finish. You scrape away the energy efficiency.
3.  Masking allows you to paint right up to the edge of the area you need paint without getting paint on the opposite surface. Anyone who has every tried to avoid using masking tape by “being very careful” knows how impossible that is. Once a blob of paint ends up in the wrong place, all efforts to wipe it up without smearing more paint are prone to catastrophe.
4. Proper masking allows you to work faster. As long as you press the tape down firmly, bleeding paint is a minor problem compared to trying to paint along trim without getting blobs of paint in the wrong place.
5. Covering things like door hinges, door knobs and other hard-to-remove hardware with painter’s masking tape and small plastic bags keeps your doors working smoothly. Nothing looks more amateurish than painted door knobs and hinges. You might be able to get away with that in a house that’s got antique hardware, but if you want your home to have maximum visual appeal, you’ll want to mask these details off.
6. Using drop cloths as part of your masking scheme ensures that horizontal surfaces are protected from drips. Two-inch wide masking tape is perfect for keeping paint off carpet at intersection with wall and floor.