Stop Hat-Banding: Reload Every Roller Length and Never Roll Onto Dry Paint

The Problem

Painters call it lap marks, halo-ing, or hat banding depending on where they trained, and it looks like a stripe or a change of color across an otherwise finished wall. It appears wherever wet paint was rolled onto paint that had already dried — most commonly across the middle of a wall that got painted in two sittings, or along a cut-in that was done well before the rolling started.

The Technique

Four habits from a painting contractor, all of them about keeping the join wet:

1. Roll into a wet cut-in. Cut in the wall and start rolling while that brushwork is still wet. Get the roller as close into the wet corner as you can. If the cut-in has been sitting since before lunch, you're rolling wet onto dry, and that's a band waiting to appear.
2. Never start a wall in the middle. Painting halfway, letting it dry, and picking up from the other side puts a wet-to-dry join right across the most visible part of the wall.
3. Reload before the nap runs dry. A dry nap dragging across the wall is its own defect. Move no more than one roller length across the wall before reloading, so the section stays saturated and genuinely wet the whole time you're working it.
4. Lay off as you go, section by section. Overlap each pass about 50% — three or four inches — and lay off the section while it's fresh. Coming back to lay off a section you finished several minutes ago drags a roller through setting paint, which draws the lines you were trying to avoid.

Work quickly. Every part of this comes down to the same thing: the paint you're joining to has to still be wet when you get there.