Code Red. Advice Needed. Painting Disaster.

In My Humble Opinion
1

To all you home improvement/handyperson types out there: Oh, the humanity.

So my girlfriend and I are painting our rental house, the expenses of which will be deducted from our rent. We can’t stand the 70’s British-drawing-room-comedy wallpaper all over the place. Teal paisleys and titanic, nicotine-stained florals. Depressing.

We decided to start with the dining room, one of the worst rooms. Dark paisleys veritably menace you while you eat, and everything tastes like bangers and mash in there. Nasty green trim, too. Appalling.

We decided to strip the wallpaper and paint the walls a kind of sky blue, and repaint all the much abused chair railing, wainscoting, and trim extra-glossy whiter-than-white.

Aha, sez I. Whoever disgraced the trim with this hideous shade of green probably used oil-based paint, so I’ll have to prime the surface first. No problem. I slapped two thick coats of primer on there (to hide the green thoroughly,) and two thick coats of super-glossy white Kilz (“Our very finest paint!”)

Man, did it ever look great.

Right up until I peeled the masking off, and the thick layers of white paint and primer peeled off in great strips, exposing the mocking facade of nasty green, untouched and in all its disgusting glory, to the world once again. I swear it was like we had wrapped the stuff in white shrinkwrap.

FUCK. Three days of work. Down. The. Fucking. Toilet. Not to mention that Kilz’s “Very Finest Paint” was dearly purchased.

Now I have an unpleasant triplet of tasks ahead of me…1) scrape and clean up all that peeled paint, 2) prep the green surface some fucking how to prevent this fiasco from repeating, and 3) repaint. All theoretically before Saturday, when we’re having a dinner party to show all our friends how we’ve gotten our shit together in this new house. Ha.

What did I do wrong? I assume my mistake was somewhere in the surface prep phase, but I’m a little unclear what I can do. Do I need to sand the green surface first? Strip it all the way down to the wood? Tack up aluminum flashing and cover the whole thing with purple naugahyde? Throw in the towel and commit ritual seppuku? Anyone want to be my second?

Just remember not to cut all the way through the neck. Bad luck.

2

Man I would’ve just bought 70s style furniture to match the walls, but thats just me.

Obviously the paint wasn’t sticking, three coats on top of primer should’ve done the trick.

My condolences for your loss. Good luck.

3

Is the original green a glossy paint? If so, you need to sand it first to give it “tooth”. This allows the new paint to stick to something.

Another problem I see with your technique is painting thick layers. You’ll get the best finish by painting 2-3 coats thinner rather than thick layers.

Also, the tape should have been removed while the paint was still wet. Otherwise, it…ahem…pulls the paint off the surface.

I love to paint. If I were closer I’d volunteer to come rescue you

4

Tooth! That must be it. The green was indeed glossy. Should I just lightly sand it (ie, just “scratch it up,”) or sand the ever loving bejeezus out of it until the raw, bleeding wood screams for mercy?

For obvious reasons, I’m hoping the former.

5

Ouch.

From this distance, it sounds like you didn’t sand the green paint to provide the new primer some “tooth” to physically hold on to. Also sounds like you didn’t then was the walls with TSP (trisodium phosphate) to remove the sanding dust and any grease/oil/dirt from the surface.

I’m going to guess that you’d be able to pull up those three layers of new paint in big depressing sheets as none of it stuck.

On re-read, it sounds like it’s just the lower third or so of the wall is affected - the chair rail and wainscot? No difference, really, in how to proceed, but at least it’s not the entire wall. And you’re right. The trim probably was done with a gloss oil. “Gloss” is hard to deal with. “Oil” is hard to deal with. The two together are misery, requiring much scrape and sand.

Rather than using tape, are your hands steady enough to “cut in” trim? This will avoid the risk of damaging the new paint or the slightly older, but still soft other paint. I use a 1 1/2" angled sash brush on trim and cut-ins. Don’t be afraid to load the brush with paint, either. A dry brush will act like dry hair - fly-away ends that will put paint in the wrong places. But don’t have it dripping, either. You might want to practice on the bottom side of the chair rail, assuming it and the wainscot are the same color, to see if you can hold a line along the edgs of the molding.

If you do insist on tape, use the “new tradition” blue stuff (rather than the old tan stuff that leaves glue behind if you leave it for more than a couple hours) on older paint or other surfaces, and use “safe mask” on fresh. It’s got a very low-stick adhesive much like Post-It notes. 3M’s version of this is a smooth white paper.

6

Were you using a latex or oil based primer? If the old paint is oil based then you must use a oil based primer as many latex primers won’t stick to an oil base. After applying an oil based primer you can use either a latex or oil based paint with no problems.

7

This happened to me in our bathroom when I decided to go latex over previous oil based painted walls. It bubbled and peeled right away and I had to remove it all before re-doing. As stated above make sure you get primer specifically for going over oil. It sticks to the surface better and mine was a water based product. They also make de glossing solutions but I don’t know how effective they are because I have always used a strong solution of TSP to de-gloss. If you haven’t bought the paint at a paint store I would heartily encourage you to do this. These folks have the experience to tell you what products to use versus the local hardware store salesperson. I also do not use tape around the trim because of the same problems you experienced.

8

Thanks for all the advice, folks. I appreciate it. I took most of it. I scraped, peeled, sanded, washed with TSP, and remasked with post-it style masking tape (after I peeled the old blue stuff up and found that it had stripped a lot of the lovely sky blue beneath it.)

The whole thing’s ready for a coat of quick-dry oil-based primer, followed by topcoat (Behr Premium Plus…the paint they send to the Vatican for the Pope’s personal blessing before selling it to you. Or at least they’d better, for as much as I paid for the shit.) All this’ll happen tomorrow night, after work, while I clean the house thoroughly.

And cook a vegan meal for 8 people.

And finish repainting an armoire and mounting new hardware.

And put the dining room back together.

Before 2PM Saturday.

Could I just go ahead and arrange for the seppuku?

9

I know everything is said and done but I’d feel terrible if I didn’t mention this and someone else did the same thing based on this thread.

Before you do sanding on anything painted and old, please make sure the paint you’re sanding isn’t lead-based.

http://www.epa.gov/iaq/lead.html

10

Also, when it comes to peeling off the masking, you can use a hair dryer to blow a bit of warm air on the masking – it will make the glue a little more gooey, so it doesn’t bind as much to the paint underneath. It will peel off a bit easier without taking paint as plaster with it.