The Importance of Proper Priming

There’s a whole non-glamourous side of room renovations that is often skimmed over and referred to in small little side phrases and snippets.

But it’s oh, so very important.

Before a room gets its shiny new paint and bits of bobbles and glamour, it first needs to get on the proper under coat (aka primer).

Just like a poorly planned outfit of black polka-dotted underwear and white pants, a room’s final look can be utterly disastrous without properly priming the surfaces.

Trust me.

I’ve learned the hard way.

I mentioned long ago when I last painted this room that something was strange with this drywall from 1927.  It seemed to “drink” up the paint.

If you look closely at the above picture, you’ll see how streaky it was.  It seemed that no matter how much paint I put on it, it never covered properly.  This time ~ even though it pained us to do so ~ we wanted to take the time to prime it properly.

We took a teeny tiny piece of the old drywall to the paint store to discuss what the issue might be.

The man was utterly intrigued by how strange the drywall was.

“It has wood chips in it!  Hey, can I keep this?”

In the end, it was determined that the drywall had NEVER been primed, thus the layers of paint didn’t adhere properly.

So before we could use our fun, new paint, we had to prime all the walls and ceiling.

{Before the walls and ceiling were primed.  Ignore the trim for now.  That’s tomorrow’s subject.}

{After priming everything.}

I could not get over how bright the room was after it got its fresh, new coat of primer.  It was as if the lights were suddenly turned on in the room.  It made me think maybe it should be white?…

Hmmm…choices.

{If you’d like specifics, we used “Aqua Lock Primer/Sealer” that was water base.  It worked like a charm.  We used one entire gallon for all the walls and ceiling.}