What are the Pros and Cons of Using a Paint Sprayer?

After buying our new home, we quickly realized it wasn't as perfect as it looked. A 1940s house with ten layers of colored paint seems a little trashy. We talked about it for a while and decided the best option was to repaint our home. We bought the paint and a paintbrush, and I got to work day after day, hour after hour. I worked on painting our home.

One weekend my mom and dad offered to come up and help us paint. With them, they brought a paint sprayer. This was mind-blowing! I am not joking when I said the paint sprayer was able to complete our house and our fence within two hours.

What are the pros and cons of a paint sprayer?

Pros of Using a Paint Sprayer

1. Paint sprayers are so fast! The time you spend painting is a 16th of what paint in one hour with a paintbrush. It is amazing!
2. Perfect coats of paint! With a bit of practice meaning 10 seconds, you can almost consider yourself a pro paint sprayer! Hold aim and spray, moving slowly and evenly. Your house or walls will look professionally done!
3. No paint brushes to clean. I hate cleaning paintbrushes! Because I'm rushing to get stuff done anyways, I don't have time to clean up a huge mess. It seems lame but true for some reason.
4. Paint sprayers can reach high spots. Do you usually have to use a ladder? Hight is not my strong suit! I need to pull out my stepstool or a ladder with anything I do. This can increase the time it takes to paint by hand! With a paint sprayer, I could easily reach our eaves and not pull anything out to make me taller.
5. With paint brushes and rollers, you have a lot of drips. From dipping a paintbrush in the bucket and transferring it to the wall, you have dropped paint on the ground on your skin, and anywhere else you don't want the color to be. With a paint sprayer, there is very little of this! The hose is in the bucket, which goes straight to the nozzle, which goes straight to where you want it. I think I got less paint on me while painting our whole house with a paint sprayer than painting one of the smallest rooms in my home.

Cons of Using a Paint Sprayer

1. A paint sprayer tends to let a lot of fumes off. In better terms, the paint mists off after hitting the walls. For me, that is the best way to describe it. 
2. You must take a lot of time to ensure that the paint spray machine is cleaned out properly. No one wants a machine full of dried-up blobs of paint.
3. It took a little while to figure out how to turn on the machine. Once you get it running, it is downhill from there!
4. The paint overlaps. Our fence is right next to our White House. It was hard not to get white color on our brown fence or brown on our white house with the paint sprayer. Ultimately we had to decide which we would prefer to paint over by hand when we were done.
5. If you don't have a long hose, you will always be moving the machine, which is a two-person job. I would strongly suggest getting a second hose that is longer.
6. It goes through paint faster than you would think. This isn't necessarily a con because it is painting three or four times faster than you could ever paint by hand. You have to be prepared to switch out buckets of paint and have enough to finish the job.
7. Paint sprayers are SO expensive! Plan on saving up your money! 

Click here to see the is the paint sprayer that I used and would highly recommend! 

"Our goal is to help the world make decisions with a list of Pros and Cons. We invite all to add to our lists to help others make the most educated decision possible. We are all in this world together to help each other and learn from what others have learned from their lives journey." 

- Pros and Cons Team

Written By: Sarah