Garage Door

[texasman]

well i just finished painting my whole house and made the garage door look so faded...i used Sherwin Williams paint on the house can i use that on the garage door so it matches the house or do i have to use special paint...anything special i need to know before painting a garage door...thanks for the help its greatly appreciated...

[garagepro]

Garage door

It's dispense do you have wooden door or steel .
I recommend you to buy oil base pint

[Nestor]

The short answer to your question is: YES, you can paint your garage door with the same exterior latex (prolly) you used on your house.

The only thing you should do is use some nail polish remover to tell if the existing paint on the door is a latex or an oil. Nail polish remover (acetone) will dissolve latex paints much more rapidly than it dissolves oil based paints. If you have any xylene handy, xylene will dissolve latex paints nearly as fast as acetone, but will barely dull the gloss of an oil based paint. Just wet a paper towel with nail polish remover and clean a small area of the garage door paint. If you notice that the garage door colour transfers to the paper towel within a few seconds of cleaning, it's a latex paint. If it takes more than 5 seconds to see any change in colour on the paper towel, and the rate of change in colour is much slower, it's an oil based paint.

If it's an oil based paint on the door and you plan to paint over it with a latex, you should sand the surface of the old paint down. Doing so increases the surface area between the two paints, resulting in better apparant adhesion of the new paint to the old. If it's a latex paint on the door, you only need to sand it down if it's semi-gloss or gloss before using either an oil base paint or a latex paint to paint over it.

But, GaragePro is right. In order to decide what the best paint to use on it is, we do need to know what kind of door you have; wood or steel.

My personal experience is that oil based paints simply stand up better outdoors than latex paints.

If it's a wood door, you'd be best off using an EXTERIOR oil based paint. That's because wood swells and shrinks as it's moisture content changes with seasonal differences in temperature and humidity. Interior oil based paints dry to much harder films that simply don't have the elasticity to stretch and shrink with wood outdoors, and so they would soon simply crack and start to peel off as whatever was under them stretched or shrunk further than they could. In fact, the primary difference between an exterior and an interior oil based paint is that the exterior oil based paint won't crosslink as heavily so it won't dry as hard, and so it'll retain sufficient elasticity to stretch and shrink with wood outdoors. That is, an exterior oil based paint will provide the hardest (and therefore most protective) coating on the door that's still elastic enough to stretch and shrink with the door.

Both interior and exterior latex paints are plenty soft enough to stretch and shrink with wood outdoors, so the primary difference between interior and exterior latex paints is how much additives in the form of mildewcides and UV blockers they have. Except for paints intended for use in bathrooms, or kitchens and bathrooms, interior latex paints don't have much of either whereas exterior latex paints have lots of both. Also, exterior latex paints will always be made of the same kind of plastic that Plexiglas is made from, whereas interior latex paints will be made either from that stuff, or the same kind of plastic that white wood glue is made from or a third kind of plastic, too.

If your garage door is steel, and it's shaded by the garage roof overhang, and you've never noticed any mold or mildew growing on any painted furniture you've stored in your garage or outdoors, then you'd actually probably be best off using an INTERIOR oil based paint (even though I fully understand that you're wanting to paint the exterior of your garage door).

That's because interior oil based paints dry to harder and therefore more protective films, and you don't have to worry about them cracking and peeling like they would on wood outdoors because the thermal expansion of steel from season to season is tiny compared to the swelling and shrinking of wood from season to season outdoors. (thermal expansion of materials is measured in parts per million per degree, whereas the expansion and contraction of wood due to changes in it's moisture content is measured in percent)

And, the smartest choice in gloss would be a FLAT interior oil based paint. That's because the flatter a paint, the better it hides an underlying colour (all else being equal), AND when it comes time to repaint your door in 20 years, you won't have to sand the old paint down. Being a flat paint, it'll already be rough enough to repaint with either an oil based or latex paint. (Yes, you can paint over a FLAT oil based paint with a latex and still expect the latex to stick well.)

Finally, if push comes to shove and you start to see that your interior oil based paint is chaulking or there's mildew growing on it, you would always be able to clean that stuff off the door and repaint with an exterior oil based paint. But if your garage roof overhang or the direction the house faces protects your door from direct sunlight, and mildew growing on paint outdoors isn't a problem in your area, you'll probably never need to do that, and you'll have the better protection provided by the harder interior oil based paint.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but how well the paint you choose resists fading due to exposure to UV light depends on the coloured pigments in that paint, and that depends entirely on the colour you choose to tint the paint. But, that's another post. If you do opt for an interior oil based paint, be sure to tell the paint store you'll be using it outdoors because some paint companies use different paint tinting colourants in their interior paints than they do in their exterior paints. That way they'll know to use their exterior tinting colourant even though they're tinting an interior paint.
(and that, no doubt, will cause a stir because often people working in paint stores don't know enough about paint to know why it might make more sense to use an interior paint outdoors, and which you should now be able to explain.)

Hope this helps.

[mygaragerepairsacramento]

Agree there, exterior latex should work man.

[San Jose Garage Experts]

If you are not sure you better call a garage door repair company, painting is usually among their cheapest services.

[garagedoorsreno]

Exterior latex should do the trick.