DIY Doctor UK DIY Forums

hi all

so, swapping bedrooms with my son seemed like a good idea, he has built in, mirrored, sliding wardrobe doors, instead of removing them and painting the walls and removing the shelves and replacing the carpet i thought i would paint them..

i did a bit of research, cleaned them and bought some spray coat primer...ok i admit it i tried to emulsion straight onto them, epic fail, the frames are metal and even though i have now removed the emulsion and sprayed them with undercoat primer the paint just keeps bubbling and peeling/flaking off.

i even tried painting the flaking areas with PVA but that didn't work either.

the mirrored glass has covered but each time i try to add another coat the roller pulls the paint off.

does anyone have any idea how i should proceed or even if this is a good idea.

many thanks

Hi

Just joined and saw your post. I don't have an answer, but have a similar problem. We recently moved into a residential block which has an art deco frontage of coloured glass. The material is vitrolite, which is a coloured glass. It is no longer made. 4 of the panels are plain glass that have been painted. I suspect that during the build some of the panels were damaged and were replaced with plain glass. Apparantly according to residents the paint keeps peeling off, as it is at the moment. I have the same question that you posed - how do you paint glass so that it does not peel off? Is there a paint that adheres to glass?

Hi
Painting glass with a standard sort of coating you would use in a domestic environment is not that easy.
As glass is very smooth and hard a lot of coatings find it difficult to adhere.
Oil based products go very hard over time and can flake off easily. Water based products are more flexible but could easily be scratched off untill they fully cure and even then depending on the product you use, can still come off.
You would need a good quality product to stand a chance.
Give plenty of time between coats.
We try to tell our customers not to paint glass unless it's, in side and out of the way from areas that could come into contact with moving objects as they could damage the film as a precaution. They still do it and we don't get any complaints. But you need to be aware of the limitations.
Ideally you would use a stick on wrap of some sort like the type used for tinting windows of cars.

Hope this helps.

Found something called Polyvine acrylic enamel paint specially formulated for painting glass. It seems to be an artsy crafty sort of paint and is sold in small 50 ml pots so probably not suitable for my needs for covering 3 or 4 sqaure metres. But is acrylic likely to be better than enamel? The damaged panel can be seen on the left. There is a similar panel on the right.

Zinnser BullsEye 123 or 123 plus can be used on ceramic tiles so worth a try on glass.
Good luck