Does Non-Primer Paint Work? (Tips for amateurs from one of the same)

First, let me just state up front, I am NOT a professional painter!!!  Nor do I own shares in, or have any other interest in, any paint or home repair company. 

So now that those caveats are out of the way, this is one amateur painter’s opinion of….

Valspar Signature Color “You Don’t Need Primer” paint.

Lowe’s claims this paint is a one-coat cover up for most walls.  They claim if you use this paint you will not need primer.  This really isn’t hard to believe if you’re covering up off-white walls that don’t have much scuffing or other marks.  Especially if you’re painting the walls a darker color.

But what if, years ago when your children were 8 and 9, they asked you to please-o-please paint their rooms green?

Not a light pale green, but a brilliant shade of green, guaranteed to be a pain in the butt to cover up… 

A color remarkably like this one: –>

Why? I have no idea why two young boys wanted their rooms painted green, but my goal at the time was for them to love their new home, and be happy in their new rooms, and go to sleep quietly at 8 or 9pm so I could get SOMETHING done, so I agreed; sure, you can have crazy-green walls.

In the succeeding 9 years, they have scratched that paint.  One of them wrote on the wall in an orange crayon or some other waxy stuff.  They’ve banged into the walls with stuff that left black marks that won’t come off.  And oh, by the way, their closet doors were painted in the same lovely color, and they were just as marred as the walls.

So we bought the paint that promises to cover “most” walls with no separate primer coat.  With just one coat of paint.

Did I believe it?

Nope.

So I took two closet doors off the other day.  Green closet doors.  And I painted them with one coat of Valspar ivory-colored paint.

Guess what!?

It worked GREAT!!!!  The paint covered all the green with one coat – it dried and you would never know there was green paint under there.

So I say, with my totally amateur hat on, that this paint works WONDERFULLY!

Now, if you are in a similar situation as me, I would make the following suggestion:

Buy one gallon of the paint first to test, try one wall, let it dry, and make sure it works as well for you.

I would also make the following two suggestions that I discovered when painting:

1) If you are painting the inside of a small closet, do not lean inside the closet to see how it looks.  You WILL get paint in your hair and you will not realize it until much later when it’s dried into great looking greyish streaks.

2) If you drip paint on the drop cloth, do not step in it with your bare feet and then walk around the house.  You WILL get drops of paint all over the hardwood floors which you WILL have to clean up which by then WILL be dry and be a little more difficult to clean.

I’m sure I’ll have more tips to add after my next painting experiment this coming week.

Until then, this is your personal amateur painter, signing off!