Is primer necessary for interior painting?
I’m about to start to paint the interior of our house (starting with the bedrooms). Currently the walls and ceiling are all painted white. For the first bedroom I will repaint the ceiling white and the walls will be a light-blue. I do intend to clean the surface with a mixture of water, bleach and TSP before I begin.
Is it really necessary to apply a primer for Interior Painting?
Thanks!
Oy. This is one of the big lasting lies perpetuated on home improvement shows. NO YOU DON’T NEED TO PRIME.
You don’t need to use TSP, either, unless your walls are all painted with semi-gloss paint. Wash them with warm water and a little ammonia and you’ll have cleaner walls that bond better and won’t peel the skin off your hands. TSP is used to strip the gloss off the existing paint so that the new paint can adhere. Only semi-gloss and high-gloss need that.
The primer is needed if your walls currently have oil-based paint on them and you want to put latex over it. It’s needed if you have water or smoke damage that you need to seal away…or you’re painting over wood and want to prevent the pitch from seeping through. You need primer if you’ve got an obnoxious color on the wall and need to take it white before putting on a lighter color. It saves many coats of regular paint that you’d need to cover the old dark color.
But none of that seems to be the case. If you’ve already got white latex on the walls, your new latex paint will stick just fine without the extra step (and smell) of priming first. Save the extra $80 and use it for new accessories.
Related posts:
No primer necessary, unless you are painting a light color over a very dark color.
References :
If you are painting wood work and it currently has oil base paint, then a correct primer is a good idea of you are going to go to latex enamel. For walls there is no need to prime.
I personally wouldn’t do that but that is a personal preference. I believe oil based enamel is more durable for interior wood work.
References :
I painted my whole house top to bottom a couple years ago. All the walls were white to start with.
I primed some rooms with Kilz primmer, and did not prime others. In the rooms I primed, I only needed one coat of paint. In the rooms I did not prime, it took two coats. So, the net affect was the same amount of painting.
The reason you don’t need two coats when you prime, is you get much better adhesion. Even if you wash the walls, there will be some spots you miss, and the paint will not stick as well.
References :
Oy. This is one of the big lasting lies perpetuated on home improvement shows. NO YOU DON’T NEED TO PRIME.
You don’t need to use TSP, either, unless your walls are all painted with semi-gloss paint. Wash them with warm water and a little ammonia and you’ll have cleaner walls that bond better and won’t peel the skin off your hands. TSP is used to strip the gloss off the existing paint so that the new paint can adhere. Only semi-gloss and high-gloss need that.
The primer is needed if your walls currently have oil-based paint on them and you want to put latex over it. It’s needed if you have water or smoke damage that you need to seal away…or you’re painting over wood and want to prevent the pitch from seeping through. You need primer if you’ve got an obnoxious color on the wall and need to take it white before putting on a lighter color. It saves many coats of regular paint that you’d need to cover the old dark color.
But none of that seems to be the case. If you’ve already got white latex on the walls, your new latex paint will stick just fine without the extra step (and smell) of priming first. Save the extra $80 and use it for new accessories.
References :
I am a Union Carpenter.I know that primer is used for newly finished drywalled walls.Primer is used as a base coat for these new walls.After a wall has been primed , defects in the finishing can be repaired, without having to repaint the entire room.
No, primer is not needed for an existing painted wall or ceiling.
References :
No, you don’t need to use a primer for what you are doing. You also don’t need to use TSP. Primer is only needed when you are painting a drastically different color on the wall from the existing color, such as painting a dark blue wall white. However, primer helps the paint adhere to the wall better, creating more even coverage and reducing the amount of paint you’ll need. So you might want to use it for that sake, but it’s not required.
References :
If your walls are white, then you likely don’t need a primer.
If you’re painting them something like a shade of red or navy, tinted primer might help to keep you from having to apply so many coats of paint in order to get the depth of color that you want as well as the desired smooth appearance.
If your walls would have been some other color already, primer would be a good idea so that the new paint would come out true to color.
References :