How To Use Milk Paint
Patti Moreno shows you how to use milk paint, a non toxic paint that loves being used on wood. Check out this video and rate it!
Step 1: Wood treatments:
There are a lot of different wood treatments you can use when you have wood outside. You can lacquer it, you can use some linseed oil on it, you can Thompson's it. But what I want to do is I want to paint it.
Step 2: Milk paint:
Now I'm going to use an exterior paint that's a little little foreign to a lot of people. Its called milk paint. I love milk paint. What its going to do is that its going to soak into the wood really really well and its going to leave a matte finish.
Now milk paint is, of course, made out of milk. It comes in a powdery form and there's a little funky thing about milk paint that you need to keep in mind. It contains lime and that's how they used to make paint in the olden days. They had lime in their paints. So you want to make sure that your hands are fully covered and that the paint doesn't touch your skin or get into your eyes or anything.
Step 3: Get milk paint locally
Now this is how the milk paint comes. It comes in a little brown paper bag. Its really cool, you just open it and this is what's inside. So I'm mixing this milk paint mixture a little bit looser than the manufacturer's instructions. And incidentally the manufacturer is local. This milk paint is made in Groton, Massachusetts so I am using a local manufacturer.
Step 4: It's perfect for wood.
I think I've got the mixture pretty well mixed, you can see its pitch black. Now milk paint is really really good for porous material. Unfinished wood is the perfect porous material for it. What we're going to do is, once we slap this on the wood is going to completely soak the milk paint in and its going to give it really really good coverage.
And I've got a small roller here, I'm just dipping it into the paint. Oops! Can you see that, how the wood is just instantly soaking it in? And my roller actually has a lot of moisture in it.
Step 5: Absorbs heat
So when the sun hits my raised beds, my black raised beds and the heat gets absorbed into the raised beds that's going to keep my composting process going in there. That's going to heat up and warm up my raised beds and give it a really good fertile environment for my plants to grow.
Step 6: Watermarks:
Definitely check out milk paint. Definitely try it at home. You can use it on furniture; you can also use it indoors too. Its a very versatile paint. Now one other thing I want you to keep in mind about milk paint and using it outside, for every other color except for white, what's going to happen is that you're going to have watermarks on it. I happen to like those watermarks. I don't think there's a problem with those water marks. And you'll eventually see it. As soon as this dries and the water starts hitting it its going to have little flecks and its going to be a little bit lighter black than what's there right now. I think that gives character. I think that makes it look even more rustic and more beautiful, so I don't mind it.
This has taken me into sunset. I can see little touch-ups that I have to go through, which I'm going to pick up tomorrow. And I'm probably going to give it a second coat too. But look at my bench it looks amazing.
