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Latex over Oil-based trim

14 years ago

Many years ago I painted the oil-based trim in my home that had yellowed and gotten dingy looking with latex. I cleaned, sanded, used a primer recommended by the paint store employee (forget the name) and then applied two coats of my trim paint. Everything looked great, and the paint never peeled off when I cleaned it.

Now I'm in a home where the previous owners applied latex paint over oil-based on the trim, and it's peeling up in many areas. Given some of the other "improvements" they made in this home, I'm fairly confident that they did not properly prepare the original oil-based trim to accept the latex paint.

I'm wanting to repaint it, and wonder if I can just use the previous method of clean, sand, primer, then new paint (I will be using Sherwin Williams Pro Classic). Will this work even with some areas peeling? (You can pull small sections up, and they seem a bit rubbery until they break.)

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Comments (5)

Faron79
14 years ago
I often wish people WOULDN'T "Paint to sell..."!

SO often, new homeowner's are victims of someone else's "let's just throw some paint on the wall & run..." methodology.
Once people learn how tedious it is to UNDO someone else's crappy job, and then RE-DO IT THE RIGHT way, they would just leave the home "as-is".

>>

OP:
Yes....peel, sand, prime, and re-coat.
Remove previous paint "by any means necessary...", or it'll come back to bite you!
Previous owners obviously just painted directly over shinier Oil trim-paint. It'll soon peel when under the tension of newly applied Latex products anyway!

Faron
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franksmom_2010
14 years ago
Amen to that! I discovered a few months ago that some of our trim paint is peeling in the kitchen. We're sure that the whole place was "painted to sell" including NEW popcorn on the ceiling. There's a few places where the popcorn is cracking and flaking.

I can't even imagine what a huge mess that will be to fix (who puts up NEW popcorn these days??) but fixing any of it isn't in the current time/money/ energy budget. It seems like every month for the last year, we've had to undo some mess that they did (plumbing, electrical, etc. etc.) I will be cursing the PO's of this house for a very long time. Some people say they'll have a party when they pay off their mortgage, and we say we're having a party when we finally fix all of their mess!
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I have also gotten conflicting advice, similar to what you have heard. I'm no expert, but I'll tell you what I ended up doing which seemed to work out pretty well, at least so far. We bought a ~100 year old home six months ago that we're just getting around to painting now, after rewiring. Most of the trim is painted with what seems to be a high gloss oil-based paint, and a much of it (especially doors and baseboards) is quite dirty. The only trim I've painted over so far is a few doors, but I'll be starting on the rest of the trim in a couple weeks. For the doors, I scraped off just whatever bits were already flaking off, then washed them really well, and then used "liquid sandpaper". If your trim is glossy you may want to use liquid sandpaper to remove the gloss. It's not a paint stripper, so you won't be left with messy globs of dissolved paint. It just removes some of the sheen so that the new layers bond to it better. Then I primed with an oil-based primer. I have used both latex and oil primers in a previous home, and the oil primers always seem to bond better. Then painted with Regal Select Semi Gloss. I haven't tried Natura, but I might... Anyway, I would recommend liquid sandpaper rather than sanding as long as the old paint is basically well-bonded to the trim, then oil-based primer, than latex paint. I'm curious what suggestions other people have..
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Faron79
14 years ago
I think for many homebuyers (paint-to-sell-"victims") like this, the proper saying should be...

"Painting to hell....."!

Faron
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Nancy in Mich
14 years ago
Hi, I am doing a search on "latex over oil" and have a question. After prepping the oil-based old paint by taking the gloss off (and any dregs of latex) is the primer you use supposed to be OIL-based primer, or are there latex-based primers now that can handle the transition between old oil-based paint and new latex or acrylic enamel? A friend over in Smaller Homes is going to repaint old kitchen cabinets that have oil paint and add some new cabinets and wants to do them all in acrylic enamel.
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PRO
Christopher Nelson Wallcovering and Painting
14 years ago
OIl based would be preferable, but there are many quality latex based primers that would work . I tend to use Ben Moore Fresh Start but there are many others.
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