How To Paint Vinyl Siding

So my name is Tom. I work at Aspect Maintenance. I'm a decorator and I'm just going to show you how we would over paint on vinyl or formica which is basically plastic.

If you try and paint directly on top of that surface the paint, it wont adhere properly basically. It will shrink back and it will leave gaps and not stick properly. So what you always need to do before you put any finish coats on is put an appropriate primer on.

One that we've got here is a high quality primer. It is actually Zinsser is the name. I'm trying to find the name somewhere.

It's called Zinsser and that their logo. It's a bit more expensive but it is worth getting if you are going to over paint on something like this vinyl. It is shellack based which means it is water based.

You can clean your brushes but if you want to clean your brushes properly you will probably want to use metholated spirit. The actual paint itself isn't oil based. So once you've put your primer on leave it for 45 minutes to an hour and once it's dry it is ready to over paint with whatever finish you would like.

So this is basically how you would paint a vinyl top. Just dust it off first. Put your primer on.

You can put it on with a mini roller or a roller again. In this case we're just going to use a brush just to show and then what we'll do when we put the color on you should be able to see the difference between the area that has been primed and that which hasn't. In there the paint will try nice a flat and stick to the primer where as the bare surface it wont actually stick.

And that's basically how we would always paint onto vinyl surfaces.