spraying / painting bedroom furniture

Painting the furniture in Lauren’s room was our trial run for the kitchen cabinets. I would suggest always doing a practice project before hitting a big one that you really don’t want to mess up.

We had purchased this paint sprayer to stain our deck and fence this summer and the reviews were good for people using it with paint, so we decided to give it a go with the primer. I think you can find it in many stores as well.

This is THE oil based primer to use for the most durable results and it is actually quite thin, so it was perfect for the sprayer.

To give you an idea of how dingy white everything was, here it is before against the test sprays. (we used the back of a beadboard panel that we’ll use in the kitchen for practice sprays). Everything needed a fresh coat of white.

First, wipe everything down using an all purpose cleaner/de-greaser. I like Fantastic or Mrs. Meyers. The paint guy recommended not using TSP, because it can affect the adhesion of some primers, and sure enough I read on the back of the Zinsser can that it says not to use TSP, so we skipped it.

Follow the directions on the sprayer for setting it up and thinning the paint, etc. Thanks to Kate’s fabulous tips, we added penetrol to the primer to thin it down a bit in the sprayer.

You’ll want to do some test sprays on a board, because if your primer isn’t thinned out enough,

it will start doing this:    Better to try on the board first. Once it was thinned correctly, the sprayer was a dream for the furniture, especially the legs of chairs, back and top of the bookcases, etc. We primed everything we could think of for her bedroom all in one shot because we didn’t want to be cleaning out oil based primer more than once. 

After spray priming, there will be a very, very fine grit that you can remove by simply going over the surfaces with a fine grit (220) sanding block.

And then you’ll be ready to paint. We DID NOT use the sprayer for the paint. I had heard great things about Benjamin Moore’s Impervo paint and I loved the finish of it, but it was really thick and I was worried that if we thinned it too much, the durability of the paint would be messed up. So, again we added penetrol to the paint and we rolled it on with a foam roller and paint brush. It went really quickly with primer already being on there, but it took forever to dry, so I knew that the paint would not be an option for the kitchen with 7 people running around here. So glad we did a trial run…

If I was in the painting furniture business, or had a lot of pieces to do, I would probably invest in an airless paint sprayer, but this one definitely cut down a lot on the priming time.

Kitchen, here we come!

I have no affiliation with any of these brands, sprayers, paint, companies, etc. Just our experience in using them.