Repainting all the walls and ceilings in your house can really refresh your home and make it appear new and clean. As a landlord of multiple properties, I’ve repainted the interior of entire homes in as little as 6 hours. Here are my tips for whole-house interior painting.
Neutral Paint Color
My go-to paint color is Hazelnut Cream 750C-2 (Eggshell) by Behr (Home Depot). It looks good both during the day and at night and in different light color temperatures.
Same Wall and Ceiling Paint Color
Unless you’re really picky or enjoy spending time masking surfaces and painting, I recommend painting the walls and ceilings the same color. It greatly simplifies the painting process. If you have an MDF baseboard, you can also paint it the same color as your wall. Or, you can paint it pure white, which is the default color.
Masking
You’ll need to mask areas you don’t want to paint, like windows, ceiling lights, and doors.
For windows, I like to staple somewhat thick (3.5 mm) transparent plastic. If it’s too thin, it’s harder to cut, it easily blows away, and it’s hard to secure to a surface. Also, stapling is much quicker and easier than taping all sides. The transparent plastic lets light in so you can see what you’re painting. Since the air pressure from spray painting can blow paint particles everywhere, I like to use a healthy margin around any objects I’m masking so that even if paint manages to get under the plastic, it won’t go far and reach the surface I don’t want painted.
For ceiling lights, I like to staple heavyweight red rosin paper over them, as shown below. Taping is not necessary as long as the paper is large enough to prevent paint particles from reaching the lights from the gaps along the edges. Cutting rosin paper is easy using scissors or a utility knife.
For other surfaces that could fit under one piece of red rosin paper, I’ll use that paper. Otherwise, for surfaces that are too large for the red rosin paper, I’ll use the plastic.
For the floor, I use red rosin paper taped to the top of the baseboard and I’ll use a plastic and fabric drop cloth for the middle of the floor.
When screwing the spray tip guard assembly to the gun, make sure to only tighten by hand. If you tighten with a wrench, it may be too tight, preventing paint from coming out.
One way to tell if you’ve tightened it too tight is if you are unable to rotate the tip from the spray to the unclog position using your hand.
If you’re having trouble spraying paint, you might need to replace one or more parts, like the spray tip, spray gun and tip, and hose. Start with replacing the spray tip first since it’s cheaper than the other parts.
Clothing
When spray painting, paint particles can go everywhere. You can buy and wear a painter’s coverall, but they are very uncomfortable. Instead, I recommend wearing sacrificial clothing that you don’t mind getting paint on. I wear a long-sleeve shirt with a hoodie so I can cover my arms and hair, leaving only my hands and face exposed to paint particles. If you wear glasses, I also recommend wearing old glasses that you don’t mind getting paint on.
Removing masks
When removing plastic or red rosin paper that was stapled to a surface, I recommend using a staple puller. It makes removing staples and nails much easier than using other methods.
Painting Masked Areas
When you’re done spray painting and removing all masks, you can easily paint any masked surfaces manually using a paint roller.
Document headings (Heading 1, Heading 2, …) are useful to show a document’s content hierarchy. But, unless styled, it can still be difficult to visually scan a document to quickly find different sections. Some techniques to add styling and improve visual hierarchy include
using a horizontal line to separate sections
using a background color
changing the heading text color
All of these styles, except the one with the different background color, look fine, but they may not suffice if you want high-contrasting section headings. You can put heading text in a 1×1 table, as shown below, but that’s not ideal, especially if your document may be parsed.
To create a table-less heading with full-width background color, do the following:
Type your heading on its own line
Select the entire heading line (triple-click to include whitespace after the text)
Go to Format → Line & paragraph spacing
Click Single
Click Remove space before paragraph
Click Remove space after paragraph
With the line still selected, go to Format → Paragraph styles → Borders and shading
Background color: e.g. #1F2933
Border width:0 pt (all sides)
Paragraph padding: e.g., 6 pt or 7 pt
You can optionally style the heading text and create a reusable heading style (Format → Paragraph styles → Heading 1 → Update “Heading 1” to match).
Here’s a link to the test document used in this post.
Here’s how I created this overview video in 5 minutes with just a single prompt.
Get Content
Gather the content for the overview video you want to create. The content can be local files (PDFs, text files, etc), copied text, and website URLs. In my case, I got these URLs to pages explaining how credit cards work:
In the left pane of NotebookLM, add your source content.
Add a Prompt
In the middle pane, add a prompt describing what you want NotebookLM to do. In my example, I asked ChatGPT to give me a prompt to tell NotebookLM to generate an overview video of the content in my sources, which I then pasted into NotebookLM.
Generate Overview Video
In the right pane, click “Video Overview” to have NotebookLM generate an overview video based on the content and your prompt. My 4-minute video was generated in a few minutes.
This is not a “build an app in 10 minutes” post. It’s a realistic guide to using AI coding agents the way you’d use a junior engineer: with specs, guardrails, and review.
In this post, I explain how to vibe code a web app using the following tools:
express-ejs-layouts (if you want template layout functionality)
Render.com (for hosting both frontend and backend)
Stripe (for payments)
3rd-party APIs (like kie.ai for text-to-image AI generation)
VS Code (code editor)
Resend (send emails using an API)
Zoho Mail (receive emails)
ImageKit (image optimization)
Note
You can use Next.js for both front-end and backend code using React and Next.js server actions, but for simplicity, I prefer to use static HTML, CSS, and JS for the front-end and Express.js for the backend. Also, you can use Typescript, but for simplicity, I prefer not to. I think these choices are fine for small apps. They definitely allow for faster vibe coding and simplify the codebase, which reduces the surface area for errors to occur, both during development and in production. If I used Next.js, I would host the app on Vercel, but since I’m not, I will host both the static frontend and Express.js backend/app server on Render.com, which simplifies deployment (push from GitHub, no CORS issues, free plan).
There are many, many, many ways to code/vibe code a web app, including using Claude Code, Cursor, Continue.dev, Gemini Antigravity, Gemini Conductor, and Agent Zero. The approach in this post is just the way I’ve found to work for me for now.
App Idea
First, you need an app idea. Consult with ChatGPT regarding the business strategy, pros, cons, and anything else you have on your mind. If you are a solopreneur, it’s probably best to keep your app simple enough that you can manage it yourself. For example, you can create an app that lets people upload an image of the front of their home and redesign their curb appeal by changing exterior paint color, yard design, and driveway design using an AI text-to-image generator like Nano Banana Pro.
User Flow & Functionality
Discuss the user flow and app functionality with ChatGPT until you decide on the details that you want for your app.
Tech Stack
Discuss with ChatGPT what tech stack you should have for your app. In my case, I prefer the stack listed above.
UI
Once you’ve decided on an app idea, ask ChatGPT to give you basic grayscale page designs using shadcn/ui and Tailwind UI components/blocks. You can try to use Google Stitch to generate more polished designs, but if you can’t, just start with a basic grayscale design first. ChatGPT can give you HTML + Tailwind CSS for these designs. For dev purposes only, just use the Tailwind CSS CDN to save time. Here are some example basic designs. Before going live, switch to compiled CSS using Tailwind.
Unique Interactive Elements
To minimize errors and guessing when the AI coding agent codes your app, have ChatGPT update all interactive elements (buttons, links, etc) with unique attributes so that the AI coding agent can uniquely target each element. For example, for buttons, have ChatGPT add a data-action attribution, e.g., <button data-action=”upload-image”…>
Database
If your project requires a database, ask ChatGPT to propose a database schema. If you agree with the schema, have ChatGPT give you a SQL script to create all tables and constraints. Save the script in a file like 001_init.sql. For the database, I prefer Supabase PostgreSQL for its simplicity.
Create an account at Supabase.com.
Create a project
Click SQL editor
Paste the SQL script and run it to create the database tables.
File Storage
If you need to store files online, like PDFs or images, there are many options, like AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2 (similar to S3 but cheaper). If you’re already using Supabase for your database, you can just use Supabase Storage to store files.
Click “Storage”
Click “New Bucket”
Enter a bucket name
Make sure to make the bucket public if your users or app code needs to access files in it
Authentication
Discuss with ChatGPT the best way to handle authentication and user account management. If you need the usual auth with logins, you can use Supabase Auth. But, if you just need a simpler auth mechanism, like using access tokens, you can do that as well. Discuss the pros and cons of each option with ChatGPT and pick one.
Payments
If you will be accepting payments in your web app, you’ll need a payment processor. Everyone seems to use Stripe for this. It has a test mode, which simplifies testing.
Emails
Your app will most likely need to send emails. There are many popular 3rd-party API-based email service providers, including Resend, Postmark, and Mailgun. I personally prefer Resend for its simplicity. For receiving emails, I do not recommend Resend. It’s too complex for that. When you’re starting off and don’t want to spend a lot of money, you can use Zoho Mail for receiving email. Setup was super simple. In my case, I set up an email address in Zoho and forwarded it to my personal Gmail, keeping a copy in Zoho Mail. Then, in Gmail, I added a “Reply as” account so I could reply to emails using my app’s domain, e.g., support@zabuun.com.
Image Optimization
If you use Next.js, it can automatically optimize images for you. If you don’t use Next.js, or if you prefer to separate the image optimization process, there are many options available, including ImageKit, Cloudinary, and TwicPics. I personally prefer ImageKit. You can still host your images in Supabase Storage or S3 and use them as a custom origin in ImageKit.
3rd-party APIs
If you’ll be dependent on external APIs, like a text-to-image generator using Nano Banana Pro, decide on which APIs to use. I’ve been using KIE because the UI is simple and it’s cheaper than fal.
Project Folder
On your computer, create a folder for your project, e.g., curb-appeal-ai. Add the SQL script to it in a folder called “sql”, e.g., curb-appeal-ai/schema/001_init.sql
Environment Variables
Ask ChatGPT for a list of all environment variables you’ll need for the app, e.g.,
Create a .env.example file and a .env file in your project folder, create accounts with each 3rd-party provider (Supabase, KIE, Stripe, etc) and add the values for each of the required variables to your .env file (not your .env.example file)
.gitignore
Create a .gitignore file in your project folder and add any files/folders you don’t want to commit, e.g.,
node_modules
.env
.DS_Store
AGENTS.md
Have ChatGPT create an AGENTS.md file in the project folder, following the format at AGENTS.md, containing all the coding guidelines the AI coding agent will need to successfully code the app without any guessing. Ask ChatGPT if any part of the guidelines and initial setup would require the coding agent to guess/infer anything while coding. If ChatGPT says yes, then resolve them now and add any necessary clarifications to AGENTS.md.
Data Formats
Different APIs have different request and response formats. For all APIs you’ll be using, have ChatGPT add each format, e.g., JSON schema, for each API to the AGENTS.md file so the AI coding agent won’t guess what the structure is like.
Logging
Tell ChatGPT to add a logging specification to AGENTS.md so the AI coding agent will log EVERYTHING to the terminal, which will help significantly with debugging.
Initialize your project
Open your project folder in VS Code
Open a terminal
git init
git add .
git commit “first commit”
OpenCode
Follow the instructions at OpenCode to install OpenCode. Or, just ask ChatGPT how to install OpenCode.
I like to run OpenCode in a VS Code terminal in a separate terminal beside other terminals I use for other purposes, like starting a dev server. In the screenshow below, you can see I have a terminal window for OpenCode and one for Node. I like to have my file explorer on the left, code editor in the middle, and terminals on the right.
AI Model
To use OpenCode, you need to connect to a model. You can use the OpenRouter API with OpenCode to easily switch between models like Claude, Gemini, and GTP Codex. However, you’ll have to buy and pay with credits. A cheaper solution is to use a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which is what I’ve been doing.
OpenCode + OpenRouter
You can use many different AI models with OpenCode, however, you’ll probably want to stick with the best models for web development, which are ranked here. Currently, Claude Opus 4.5 is the best model, but it’s expensive. I’ve been using GPT 5.2 Codex, which is good and cheaper than Opus. Gemini 3 is probably just as good. Instead of creating an account with each LLM provider, it’s easier to just create an account with OpenRouter, which allows you to pay in one place and use a single API key while giving you access to all of the models it supports.
In VS Code,
open a terminal
type “opencode” to launch the OpenCode TUI (Terminal User Interface)
type “/connect” to connect to an LLM provider
4. type “openrouter” to filter the list and click on “OpenRouter”
5. Copy/paste your API key from OpenRouter and hit Enter.
6. type “/models” to view the list of available models
7. Search/browse for the model you want and click on it.
OpenCode has 2 modes: Plan and Build. Click the tab key to switch between modes.
The Plan mode reads your codebase, creates an AGENTS.md file if you don’t already have one, asks questions, and creates a coding plan. It doesn’t modify any files.
The Build mode is for coding.
If you enter a prompt in OpenCode and you get a “User not found” error, then you pasted your API key incorrectly. Re-enter your API key and try again.
OpenCode + ChatGPT Plus/Pro
To connect OpenCode to a ChatGPT Plus web subscription, type /connect to open the “Connect a provider” modal. Search for “OpenAI (ChatGPT Plus/Pro or API key) and click it. A link will appear. Open the link in a browser and log in to your ChatGPT account. That will connect OpenCode to your ChatGPT Plus/Pro web subscription account. I find this to be much cheaper than buying credits.
Plan
Switch to Plan mode by hitting the tab key. Ask ChatGPT to guide you through planning and development. In Plan mode, the agent can’t edit any files. Whenever you start a new OpenCode session, always tell the agent to read through AGENTS.md and, optionally, to audit the codebase. You can say things like
Read the AGENTS.md file and all files in the repo to get up to speed on what this app is about and what has been done
Let’s build this app one step at a time following a typical user flow, e.g., 1) sign up, 2) log in, 3) use app, etc
The “Forgot Password” feature gives an error. See attached screenshot. Please debug and propose a fix.
Modularize all header and footer HTML into partials using EJS
Build
When you are ready to have OpenCode code, switch to the Build mode. You can say things like
implement the plan you just described in Plan mode
Test & Debug
When OpenCode is done coding, you will need to test your app. I like to follow the following workflow:
Test functionality in browser
Switch to Plan mode
If there’s an error, tell the agent. Optionally include a screenshot.
The agent explains the error.
If the error is not related to code, e.g., Supabase config error, the agent tells me what to fix myself.
If the error is a minor coding error, I’ll just fix it myself.
If the error is more than a simple one-line fix, I switch to Build mode and have the agent fix the error.
Once the fix has been made, I test the functionality.
If functionality is fixed, I switch to Plan mode and ask the agent to give me a commit message.
I commit the code changes. Otherwise, I repeat from step 3 until the bug is fixed.
