Painting Varnished Wood

Hi,

I could do with some advice on how to paint varnished wood. I also have a couple of questions. I have done a google search on this news group for answers but there seem to be a number of solutions to my problem so I could do with a little clarification.

Basically, the house I am looking to purchase has the following

- brown skirting boards

- brown panel doors

- brown wooden stair banister. This is a really really deep brown colour.

Im no expert at all on wood, but I imagine that all of the above was originally light coloured wood when it was fabricated and was then stained to make it the current colour. Does this sound correct?

What I would like to look at doing is making all of this white. Can all of the above listed areas be easily turned white including the panel doors?

Reading other posts it seems that there are a couple of ways to do this. The first way seems to be to sand down the surface so the new primer/paint has something to key to. Do I need to fully sand down the surface or just "rough" the surface up.

Presumably I need to apply a primer before paint?

The second method appears to be to buy some special paint/primer(?) and just apply that to the current surface and then just gloss paint over it. How effective is this method and is it more cost/time effective that sanding the surface down?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Charles.

Reply to
Charles Middleton
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Wash it. Scuff sand it. Undercoat (Not primer). Sand it again. If brown is not grinning through then top coat it. If it is, then a further undercoat wouldn't go remiss.

Paul Mc cann

Reply to
Paul Mc Cann

Without knowning the age and state of the house and/or previous resident, how could we offer a remotely accurate comment to that?

Would you be happy with stripped pine? Take a door to a firm that does that for a test run. It tends to grey a little and can ruin the glue. That's presuming you have wooden doors and not hardboard or fibreglass ones.

If it is varnish you will need a little more preparation to use acrylic rather than oil based undercoat. I'm not sure there is that much in it so stick with oil based.

But painting bannisters is a lot of work and boring as hell. Stripping it would be a lot easier, then just varnish it.

Sounds like a lot of work. I'd be tempted to get some quotes if you know any painters at your local pub.

If you go the paint stripper route; select a small area (say 4 or 5 rails at a time -that way you can paint it on the next bit whilst waiting for the last section to blister) to apply it to then brush it on liberally and after a small pause to let it finish reacting, steel wool it. You can scrape it off flat surfaces then steel wool it.

Don't worry about the dirt drying on the work just get the rubbish moving. It will come fully clean when dry if you go over it with steel wool again.

The trouble is on an old building you may expose the reason the monkey used such yeeughing paint on it for in the first place.

Reply to
Michael McNeil

Yes undercoat takes really well to varnish. I'd add - wash with sugar soap.

cheers

Jacob

Reply to
jacob

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