Primer is important if you want your paint job to last, but not just any primer will do. You need professional priming with a quality product, or you might as well not do it at all. Your Bothell, WA painting contractor should be able to explain exactly what primer does and what type will be best for your situation.
What Makes Our Professional Primer Important?
The point of a primer is to offer a base surface. This allows the top coat of paint to bond to something, meaning your paint job will last longer. It’s especially important to use primer when you have a surface that needs to be painted but you can’t clean it thoroughly. When that happens, the paint adheres to the dirt rather than to the surface, and your paint job is going to look terrible very quickly. When you add a primer, you give the paint something to grab onto.
There’s some other benefits to primer. For one thing, it can hide certain things, like knots in wood. It can also stop an old color from bleeding through, and with a good primer, you need fewer coats to finish the job. Primer is also extremely important when you have a porous surface, like concrete. The paint will tend to just soak into the pores of the concrete or wood that you’re painting, meaning that you lose a lot of quality paint and have to do extra coats. Primer minimizes this issue.
Overall, using a primer saves you time and money at the time that you do the painting, and it enables the paint to last longer so that you don’t have to repaint so soon.
Types of Primer
Water-Based
The most common type of primer is water-based. It dries quickly, has much lower VOC levels than other types, is easier to clean up, and is perfect for new wood or bare drywall. It’s also good for bricks, plaster, and metal, and generally it provides an excellent surface for painting. The best water-based primers have acrylic resins for their base.
Oil-Based
Oil-based primers are not as common as the water-based ones, but they do have their uses. They’re really good for getting rid of stains, for instance, and they’re also very good at preventing stains from developing later. This makes them a solid choice when you need to paint something that people will be touching all the time, such as the banister of a stairway. They’re also good for painting over something that’s already got a lot of stains.
They work best when you’re also using an oil-based paint, and they will work on most surfaces. However, oil-based primers do release more VOCs into the atmosphere, and they take longer to dry.
Talk to a Bothell, WA Painting Contractor for More
To find out the best primer for your project, contact us today at JA Seekins Painting in Bothell, WA. We’ve been serving King County and Snohomish County with quality painting services for over 35 years.
Connect with us
425-552-1031
Bothell, WA 98021