Primer is Your Friend

Lesson Learned:

Primer is Your Friend.

Priming your dollhouse. This is something that I did not do on the other dollhouses that I built because I wasn’t sure it was necessary. This time, I painted the whole thing white as I went, which ended up being a really great idea.

This one’s a quick one. By priming the house as I went, I made sure that when two walls came together, and met in a place where I would never be able to fit a paintbrush later on, the primer was already there. Have I mentioned that doing things the easy way is always a good idea? This also helped a lot with the trim (which I painted white) because the initial primer sealed the wood, it made for another (ever so slight) layer of adhesion, and it made it easy for me to scrub or scrape mistakes off of the wood as I went. Without the primer, a drop of wood glue on the face of the dollhouse would dry and become a permanent zit on the front of the house. With the primer, even dry glue was pretty easy to knock off with a sharp knife.

When I get around to building my next dollhouse, I will definitely be priming everything that won’t be stained while the structure is being built.

Dollhouse half-assembled and primed in white paint

What others have to say:

Here are a few folks who know more about primer than I care to:

  • DoItYourself.com Has an article about different kinds of primer. (Jeez, was there a sale on full-page popups that I missed? They are everywhere!)
  • Popular Mechanics explains more reasons why primer is a good idea (yep, full page popup.)
  • Bob Villa What would Bob do? (What wouldn’t Bob do? Subject you to a full page popup.)
  • HowStuffWorks.com explains in pretty good detail how primer works. (And, I love StuffYouShouldKnow).
  • StuffYouShouldKnow has nothing about how glue works, or how you can use masking tape to glue surfaces together. (They also don’t have full-page popup ads.)