Pro Painters Tips: Avoid Blue Tape & Foam Rollers, Get a Good Roller Bucket, and More
I used to manage the installations for a SoHo (NYC) art gallery for a few years and we’d have to routinely do painting patch work and touch-ups. When I started working at the gallery they used flat rolling trays to hold the paint and non-extending 5′ broom poles; the space had 14′ ceilings so a scaffolding was needed to get up high. Once I upgraded the equipment to long-nap rollers, extending poles, and buckets the work went a lot quicker – I could do floor-to-ceiling work without the scaffolding for most work and so I got back a lot more time to tinker on other projects for the gallery (aside: we used Red Hat Linux to power all our multimedia displays so we did a fair bit of tinkering 
). So I’m pretty fond of Epbot’s pro painting tips blog – and video – which sums up a lot of what people do wrong with what should be simple home paint jobs.
Anyhoo, so trust me, we’re pretty OK at this painting thing. We still paint for friends pretty often, so it makes me crazy when the ones who live too far away are struggling through a project using all the wrong tools and techniques – or worse, when I hear the awful advice given on some of those home decor shows. (If I see ONE MORE DESIGNER saying to paint in an X pattern…well, I’ll be miffed.)
