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How to Paint Laminate Furniture

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Googled the following search terms:

“Painting laminate furniture”

“How do I paint laminate?”

“Can I paint laminate?”

“Why won’t someone tell me how to paint this piece of laminate furniture?????”

You know what those searches returned? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. I couldn’t find a single tutorial out there to tell me how to paint laminate furniture.

Well, fine. I’ll just figure it out by myself and share it with my blog readers. ::sticks out tongue at Google::

Let me be the first to tell you this: With the right preparations, you CAN paint laminate furniture and it WILL look good. You just need to follow the following steps:

1. I started with a light wood laminate armoire from my son’s playroom. The piece is very heavy and solid, so it’s a nice piece of furniture despite it being covered in laminate.

2. If your laminate piece is one that can be easily taken apart, go ahead and do that. DH offered to take apart the armoire for me to paint, and it made it much easier in the long run since the piece was so big and heavy. There was no way that DH and I could have gotten it from the upstairs playroom down to the garage by ourselves. If you can’t take your piece apart, at least try to remove any doors, drawers and shelves.

3. With a 220 grit sandpaper, sand every square inch that you will be painting. The sanding will be much easier if you use a palm sander (they are about $30 at home improvement stores if you don’t have one). You will need to hand sand any areas you can’t reach with the sander.

Sand until you start to see little white flecks on the furniture and the shine of the laminate is removed. Be careful not to sand down to the plywood or other pressed wood that is underneath the laminate.

4. Next, take a tack cloth and wipe down the pieces you sanded. You’ll want to make sure you remove all of the sanding dust so that it won’t ruin your paint job. I like to wipe down each piece right before I prime it so that I don’t run the risk of additional particles getting on the pieces before I paint.

5. Now it’s time to prime your pieces. There may be other brands of primer that will work, but I specifically recommend the Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3 primer for this job. It is formulated for all types of projects, including laminate. I picked up a quart of this at Lowe’s for about $9.

Prime each piece with a foam brush. I used a foam roller to paint the large pieces and then used a 2-inch foam brush to paint the edges and hard to reach areas. I gave each piece one coat of primer.

I primed one of my pieces after just sanding half of it, just so you can see how important the sanding step is in this process. Here, the left side was sanded and the right side wasn’t. The difference in the way the primer laid down is truly remarkable.

You will need to let your primed pieces completely dry and cure before you move to the next step. Zinsser recommends 7 days; other brands may recommend a different length of time. Your pieces will be dry to the touch within a few hours, but they will not be scratch resistant until the primer is fully hardened. I cannot stress this enough. Don’t rush it and try to paint over the primer before it is cured, as your pieces will scratch easily. If you wait the recommended amount of time, your paint job won’t scratch easily.

6. Now comes the fun part – the paint! Using a foam roller and foam brush, I painted two coats of paint on my pieces, allowing each to dry overnight before I applied the second coat. I chose an interior eggshell sheen for my paint, which is in between flat and semi-gloss. I paid careful attention to catch any drips, but those I missed I removed with a single-edged razor once dry and repainted.

7. Once the paint dried overnight, we reassembled the piece and touched up any areas that I missed or that got scratched during the reassembly process. We definitely scratched up the interior of the piece when we were putting the shelving back in since they are a very tight fit.

With a small foam brush, I simply touched up those scratched places with a few coats of paint and you can’t even tell they were scratched.

8. If your piece is one that is going to get a lot of wear and tear, I’d recommend applying a polyurethane coat. Minwax makes a wipe-on version you can apply with a sponge, so I think that one would be easy to apply. I will likely go back and apply the polyurethane coat to my piece when I have time in a few weeks.

9. Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy your “new” piece of furniture!

Pretty easy, huh? It just takes some patience and time, but the results would be well worth it. I’d love to know how these steps work for you (and let me know if you have any questions)! Or, are you still scared to paint your laminate furniture?

Update on 12/8/11 – Since writing this post, many advances have been made in laminate painting.  Although my method still works wonderfully, there is a new product on the market called Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations.  I have tested the product and think very highly of it.  Although it is made with kitchen cabinets in mind, it can be applied to laminate furniture with really great results.  If the thought of allowing primer to cure for the full 7 days scares you, head to Home Depot or Lowe’s and see if they have the Rustoleum product in stock.

The Dino-mite Playroom

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Two weeks ago, Melissa at The Inspired Room challenged us to stop procrastinating and start creating. Being as that I always have some sort of transformation in mind, I had several different options to choose from.

I weighed my possibilities and ultimately decided that I would transform my son’s playroom in three areas:

  1. Add a window treatment to a bare window;
  2. Paint the armoire that holds his television and set up the TV/DVD/Cable box system properly;
  3. Add adult seating to the room.

I’m pretty sure some of you thought I was absolutely insane to tackle all of that at once. You were right. However, as the Queen of Biting Off More Than I Can Chew, I made it all happen within the two week time period Melissa gave us to complete our projects.

Let’s start by checking out the window. This is the before: Bare. Sterile. My neighbor’s roof.

After about 6 yards of fabric, 6 yards of trim and two pre-made curtain panels, I bring you this:

Love it.

If you can’t tell, the valence has a dinosaur silhouette print on camo color blocks (Ick! to camo, but this totally works). The stripe at the bottom of the panels is a coordinating fabric. This is a totally different direction than I originally wanted to take this room, as I’m not into themed rooms. However, Zack saw this fabric at the store and loved it. He’s apparently got a good eye, because this is playful yet still classic and grown-up.

This window treatment was a very easy one to put together, and I’m planning to write a tutorial on it to post in the next few weeks. I love how rich and layered it looks.

Next, let’s move on to the armoire. It is a substantial (read: very heavy) piece of laminate furniture that we bought for Zack before he was even born. I wanted to continue to use it because it’s very well made and has nice lines, but I’m just not into the light colored wood right now.

After searching and searching online for a tutorial on how to paint laminate furniture, I found nothing that thoroughly detailed the process. So, I just figured it out myself! Don’t worry, I’m going to share the steps with you next week because it is very easy – just time consuming. I added the striped fabric from the window treatments into the insets of the doors and installed new knobs. The paint color is Antique White from Behr and matches the dinosaur print perfectly.

Shhh…listen closely. Doesn’t it scream Pottery Barn to you now? Love it, love it. You can even see the dinosaur diorama on top of the armoire.

To create the insets, I laid a piece of butcher paper on top of the door and traced the shape of the insets. I cut out the tracing and used it as a template to cut a piece of foam board into the right shape. Then, I heated up my glue gun and glued the fabric onto the board (wrapping the edges around to the back) and glued the board to the door. Easy peasy.

DH even helped me hook up the DVD player and the cable box to the TV. We moved all of Zack’s movies upstairs, so now he can turn his on his own movies during TV time.

Lastly, we moved the ugly but comfy La-Z-Boy recliner out of the master bedroom…

…and put it upstairs in the playroom to add some adult seating. Per some suggestions I received, I added a sage green throw blanket to the chair. I also made a pillow sham for the chair using the three fabrics I have used throughout the room. I’m planning a tutorial on that one, too.

This is such a nice spot to sit now. I have to fight Zack over this space. Love it, love it, love it.

Let’s take a look at it all the whole room put together. Here’s the before:

And here’s the after (please remember I’ve added no accessories yet, so don’t look at my bare walls or the non-matching lamp):

Quite the transformation! As my DH pointed out, “Gosh, it looks, like, put together now.”

Just so you don’t think I’m always on top of everything, here’s a peak of what the room looked like just before I took pictures. See? Zack stole my chair!

Thanks so much, Melissa, for hosting this Procrastination Party! Otherwise, this room would still look bare and I would still be ignoring it. Now, we are enjoying it to the fullest!