Painting a garage door...

Crabman

The garage door + frame collapsed onto my previously immaculate car the other day, it's just been refitted inside a new reinforced frame. I'm looking to paint the metal door however - there appear to be two coats of paint on it already, a dark red underneath and then a lighter shade of red on top.

Should I be sanding the topcoat down then using gloss, or go the whole way to bare metal and start with an undercoat + then gloss?

We're changing the colour from red to a creamy white which will suit better. I've never done this before so would appreciate any tips & tricks to save the usual disaster when I attempt anything midly DIY-related!

Thanks :beer:

Crabman

Poppycat

I painted my garage door (metal type up and over) from a darkish green to bright red (Wilko's one coat paint), it took 2 coats of gloss. If I had done it again, I would have painted with undercoat or white gloss then add colour of your choice later, white paint is always cheaper to get then coloured paint

Crabman

Poppycat wrote: »

I painted my garage door (metal type up and over) from a darkish green to bright red (Wilko's one coat paint), it took 2 coats of gloss. If I had done it again, I would have painted with undercoat or white gloss then add colour of your choice later, white paint is always cheaper to get then coloured paint

Thanks Poppycat did you sand down to get a smooth surface or is that not necessary if a couple of gloss coats are going on?

The paint is flaky on the bottom and can see some bare metal, so maybe I should do an undercoat/white gloss coat as you say followed by the gloss of desired colour...

Poppycat

Hi all I did was removes some paint blisters and then repainted soon after.

If paint is flaky just scrape off with a metal scraper and its if bare metal get some metal primer on it then undercoat and or use one coat paint (white) and desired colour after. If it still shows through another coat should be fine.

Crabman

I'll need to do a lot of scraping then as there's a lot of it. Found some masonry paint in the garage though I'll need to get some undercoat later. Hopefully after primer the white coat followed by the cream should be ok as they're both fairly light colours. Thanks for helping this useless DIY'er, wish me luck!

Stompa

Just painted mine with Hammerite Garage Door Paint. It's OK, but very thick - so quite hard work to apply. Unfortunately I also managed to get quite a lot of runs - which seem to form quite a long while after applying the paint. It also didn't go anything like as far as the coverage specified on the tin.

Crabman

Thanks but the only live residents of my garage are the ungrateful rats that helped themselves to my bread :rolleyes:

I was all ready to paint away and wham, it started raining, tomorrow looks good though it's just started to rain again...

Oops missed your post poppycat

Lord_Gardener

A wire brush attachment on an electric drill makes light work of that flaky paint leaving an ideal finish for priming then undercoating!