Reasons to Prepare a Piece of Furniture for Latex Paint and Spray Paint

I am in the middle of re-painting the first piece of furniture I ever spray-painted - a small side table.  While sanding this baby down, I realized that there were so many lessons I learned from this one huge mess of a "painting" mistake.

A little background:  I bought this little side table off of Amazon or Overstock about 5 years ago.  It was originally all black and after having the piece for about a year, I decided to spray-paint it a cream color in a semi-gloss finish.  I did not sand, clean, or prime the piece.

As I have said before, I always recommend sanding, cleaning, and priming a piece of furniture before painting with latex paint or spray-painting because you want the paint to "stick" to your piece of furniture.  Some of you may be thinking "it's paint, paint sticks to everything".  I know because that is what I thought when I spray-painted this piece.  HOWEVER, the pictures below will show you that paint doesn't stick on everything.

Notice in the picture above how the inside of the leg is still black and how there are black blotchy spots along the front of the table.  I can guarantee you that I sprayed the inside of this leg about 5 times, but the color just never adhered to the actual table.  

Yep...more blotchy spots...allll along the front of this table....

...even on the top, left corner of the table.

What can I say?  I am really, really embarrassed by how this table looks, but it was the first piece I ever painted.  The funny thing is I've lived with the table looking like this for the last 4 years...I have no excuse, it just has never been very high on my list of priorities!  

Looking at the side of the table today, I realized that there were also a bunch of drip marks that looked especially bad in daylight.

Again, I have no excuse for why I allowed the piece to look this bad.  The good thing about having a horrible first painting experience like this is that I now know why I need to sand, clean, and prime a piece before painting with latex paint or spray painting.

Before painting a piece of furniture, I always like to start out by sanding with 120 grit sand paper to smooth out the surface.  This is what I started doing to this table today!

I didn't sand the side table down to the original black finish, but I did make sure to sand off all the semi-glossy finish of the spray paint.  I also paid extra attention to the side of the table to smooth out the drip marks!  After sanding the piece, I wiped it down with a damp cloth to get rid of any dust.  

Throughout this next week, I plan on priming and then painting the table with a small sample-sized pot of paint I grabbed from Lowes.  I can't wait to show you guys the before and after for this table!  If you guys didn't see a reason to sand, clean, and prime a piece of furniture before painting it with latex paint or spray-painting it, please refer to the pictures above!  

Also, as I've mentioned in my previous furniture painting post, I like to use Kilz Premium Primer because it is the only one I've tried and it has yet to fail me.  Another primer that I have read many good things about in blogs is Zinsser 1-2-3 water-based primer, which I assume works the same as the Kilz Primer.

I hope this post helps you in your furniture painting adventures!  Hopefully you won't have a horrible first time experience like I did and if you do, don't worry it's just paint!