What room is this for? Are you living in the house?

My favorite paint is California brand. We have used both California Ultra Waterborne (ceramic premium waterbourne enamel) and California Ultraplate (a urethane modified acrylic) for trim, doors, & cabinets.

I like them both. Ultraplate cures harder, but has a higher shine. Ultra WB comes in both satin & semi. Both will give a perfect sprayed finish, & are WATER based!

is it all new trim or repaint

@rockinfinefinish It is all new trim and paneling.

@maryelizabeth we have the paneling throughout the home. Entrance, dining room, and two kids bedrooms.

Thanks ci_lantro, I forgot to mention the need for primer. Although we used Styx primer (also a waterborne product.) (California Brand comparable to Styx is Grip Coat.)

So, Sylva, has your painter given you reasons as to why he wants to use a lacquer? And how he proposed to do that if you are living in the home, rather than new construction?

Hopefully Beth will show up here. She is a wealth of knowledge, information and expert advice!

waterbase products have come a long way. 90% of work we do now a days is waterbase. you can do lacquer but I would do a waterbase one.

Thank you @maryelizabeth. Sorry I didn’t mention earlier, we are not living in the house.

Just my 2¢...

I love lacquer, but I can't think of any legitimate reason to spray lacquer on wainscoting over painting it. I learned to spray with lacquer and it is very forgiving so there is a special place in my heart for lacquer. However, it has fallen out of favor for several good reasons, such as yellowing over a relatively short time, legitimate health risks, and the fact that it explodes rather too often for comfort.

I build a lot of wainscoting over the summer and for painted wainscoting I usually recommend a good quality trim paint. It will look good and be much easier to repaint when you need to. There are coatings that will give you more durability, but nothing in the world is going to make door trim durable enough to avoid periodic repainting, and when you have to do that, you're going to pay for that lacquer.

If you have some special conditions and need more durability I would recommend one of the waterborne products from ICA coatings, but barring that use a good quality trim paint.

Good luck

@bry911 @Rockin' Fine Finish @Mary Elizabeth @ci_lantro thank you all for your input. it's been really helpful.

Do we need to use a specific type of paint for trim? We are purchasing paint from Dunn Edwards. Thanks again!

I am not familiar with Dunn Edwards paint, but assume the duraflo would be their most durable trim paint. Benjamin Moore Advance has more gloss levels available, so a good alternative.

ETA: Actually maybe Aristoshield is their premium version.

Lacquer is going to be extremely shiny. Is that the look you want? I use oil based high gloss paint on all my trim, (it actually doesn't look too shiny). I feel it holds up better than a water based product.

At this point there are plenty of flat lacquers. Most companies are going to make something that gets down under a 30 and many will get down under 10. I believe that Sherwin Williams hi-bild precat is between 4-8, which approaches a dead flat sheen.

Paints have come a very long way in the last 20 years and oil based paints are a bit of a dinosaur. I would argue that a solvent based waterborne has most of the advantages of a regular solvent based paint while minimizing the drawbacks.

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Just for some clarity, for years oil (alkyd) based enamel paints were far superior to water based paints, but they were a real pain to clean up and they are not particularly healthy during the curing process. Additionally, oil based paints tend to yellow over time.

The other option was water based acrylic paints, which are safer, don't yellow, and clean up easier. However, they were significantly less durable for much of their existence. Still they became much more popular for a variety of reasons and with that popularity came the race to improve them. Today many acrylics will approach the durability of enamels.

So this all seemed pretty simple until someone working on safer versions of alkyd based spray paint stumbled on a way to suspend the alkyd reaction in an acrylic solution. Thus we got the waterborne alkyd paints. These are essentially enamels that cure primarily by evaporation until near the end when they use the typical chemical reaction of alkyd paints for a final cure. This drastically reduces yellowing, allows water clean-up, eliminates most of the safety concerns, and allows the durability of an alkyd based paint. At this point these have really surpassed traditional oil based paints in performance. So I urge everyone to look into them.

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There are other coatings that are useful but use other delivery media that I am not going to talk abut for fear this thing could get out of hand. The discussion above is really about what we would think of as traditional paints rather than industrial coatings.