Dining Room Progress: Week 4 {all about primer}

This week was full of lots of little finicky and not particularly exciting details in the dining room. So many in fact, I had trouble deciding on an appropriate title for this post. 

Some contenders were: 

Let there be WHITE! 

or 

Wood filler, you are miracle worker. 

or 

Primer, how I love thee.

In the end, I went with the old standby, Progress: Week 4. It's all encompassing, simple and to the point. Just like this past weeks' work. 

Sooooo.... before we can move onto the fun stuff, like trim installation and color application, we have to take care of the prep work. Mr. DD tackled the walls a couple of weeks back, but the windows still had to be addressed.

Ah, the wonderful world of wood filler. Does it get any more exciting than this? I mean, really. 

If you've never used wood filler, it's not all that different from spackle. Essentially, it's spackle for wood. Slather it on, working it into any groves or holes or cracks in the wood. Let it dry and sand, baby, sand. 

Once most of the little nooks and crannies were filled and sanded, we turned our attention to primer. 

Now, some people might try to skip the primer step or go for the 2 in 1 primer and paint option. In our experience, we've found that a good coat of primer makes all the difference. Do not skip this step.  I'm telling you, it's so worth it. 

All the trim and windows received a coat of Zinnser Bulls Eye 1-2-3 primer. This is a water based primer with cover stain. I'm a big believe in all Zinnser products, but this is the one we use the most frequently. Not only does it provide excellent coverage, but it also helps to keep any of the old paint or water stains from seeping through. Plus, in an older home like ours, there is a pretty good chance that our trim was painted with an oil-based paint, which means you can't just paint latex {water-based} over it. Primer provides a clean surface that any paint will adhere to. 

Again, I can't stress enough how important primer is!

You may remember the saga with our walls once the wall paper was removed, if not, click here for a reminder. Essentially, once the paper was removed we were left with evidence of the former moulding. Our walls were in bad shape. And that's putting it mildly. 

After our patches and repairs, we opted to use two coats of Zinnser Cover Stain Oil Based Primer. 

So, why oil based primer for the walls? 

Mostly, because our walls are in really bad shape. But also because we were told that the remaining moulding adhesive on the walls can sometimes repel water based paints. 

The oil-based primer seems to be a thicker paint, which will go along way to covering and filling some of the remaining inperfections in the walls. Same rational for the two coats. With just one coat we could still see the outline of the previous moulding. Two coats covered it completely. 

Next week we'll be turning our attention to the moulding. Our plan is to add in a slightly up scale version of board and batten. We're essentially starting from scratch after the guys that came to do the arch, couldn't find matching baseboard moulding. Wish us luck. I have a feeling the selection process is going to take awhile!

Have a great weekend.

until next time,