How to Paint Laminate Furniture in 4 Easy Steps
How to Paint Laminate Furniture
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If you are here that means you have found your new furniture, and are ready to paint your laminate furniture, congrats! If you don’t have your new furniture yet, check here for tips on a great deal! If you need help identifying if your furniture is real or fake wood, you can check out this article. Once you are ready, here are your next steps.
1. Scrub the laminate furniture as clean as possible! Since you won’t be sanding the furniture and removing the first layer, we want to get the piece as squeaky clean as we can so that we aren’t painting over someone else’s leftover coffee stain, crayon art, or anything else that comes along with a secondhand piece of furniture. Scrub that bad boy.
2. No sanding required! This doesn’t mean optional… don’t do it! Sanding laminate furniture is risky because it’s not real wood, you can sand through the laminate and hit the rough (less pretty) wood behind it. Laminate can sometimes have solid wood behind it, but oftentimes it also can have pressed boards. At that point, the messy wood won’t be able to smooth out. When painting laminate furniture the key is having a clean smooth workspace to paint on, and heavy sanding is NOT the move.
3. Time to pick your paint! There are a few options for painting furniture. I stick to a Sherwin Williams paint if I can (ex-employee over here) because I trust their quality of paint more than anything else. Duration paint is one of my favorite paints! Sheen is less important when you have a great quality paint. That’s not to say that I won’t use chalk paint now and again either.
- Chalk paint can be great for projects that you don’t want to spend a lot of time prepping. In the case of laminate furniture, it’s a great option. Chalk paint can be thick, so when painting with it I use a spray water bottle to spray my brush lightly with water. This helps to thin the paint just enough to help it spread easier and lay nicer. When it spreads smoother, you’ll see fewer brush strokes and the paint can go further.
- If using interior paint for your piece of laminate furniture, chances are you will need fewer coats, and less tampering to get the paint to cooperate. The difference between painting with chalk paint and interior paint is night and day once I tried interior paint, and I rarely go back to chalk unless I feel like it makes sense for the project. Interior paint such as Sherwin Williams Duration goes on smooths, stands up to high traffic, and can be sealed up with a polycrylic just like chalk paint or stain.
4. Once you have scrubbed and painted, time to seal it up! Naturally, my first pick is Polycrylic MinWax in Matte, but you can choose whichever sheen you prefer. Let the polycrylic cure for a full 24 hours, and then you’re done!
