LESLIE: Madeline in Rhode Island is dressing up her kitchen. What can we do for you?
MADELINE: Hi. I want to change my kitchen and give it a quick fix by changing the color scheme, repainting cabinets and changing up the hardware and stuff and I’m really limited by the color of my countertops.
TOM and LESLIE: OK.
MADELINE: Which I believe is Formica. I don’t know what the real brand name of it is but it’s a laminate. I’d like to change the color of it and my question is can it be painted. People tell me it can be but what is the proper procedure as far as roughing it up – I suppose it would need – and …
LESLIE: Well, there are a couple of products on the market that are made specifically to be countertop paints; perfect for a laminate countertop situation. Sanding it – I would definitely make sure first that I clean the countertop very, very well because sanding it you don’t want to be too aggressive with because some of that scuffing that you might do will show through in the painting process.
Rust-Oleum has a countertop paint and they call it simply the Rust-Oleum Countertop Coating. And it comes in a quart-size; it’s less than 20 bucks a quart. It comes in, I want to say, 20 different color choices so you can go from buttery yellows to ones that are more earthy, taupey, grays; ones that even look like concrete. It works really well. We used it on an episode of $100 Makeover because it was right in our price point. It does take three days to cure; so once you get it on there, you want to make sure that you don’t touch it, clean it, put anything down on it. Just really let it do its work. And that works really well.
Tom and I also know of a company called GIANI. They make a granite paint. And that takes a little bit more skill in the application because you’re doing a base coat and then you’re sort of putting on the veining, if you will, by brushing on, in an artful way, a different type of coating on it. So that can create a granite look. It’s available in sort of like a black tone and a creamy tone.
I prefer, when I’m painting my countertops – unless I’m really skilled at faux finishing – to sort of just go with something more simple because it’s kind of …
MADELINE: Yeah, I’ve never done anything like this before, so I probably ought to stay with the basic solid color.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm. And Rust-Oleum, I would go to their website, which is RustOleum.com, just because – to search it out. The countertop paint is kind of new, so it’s not available everywhere; so you might want to start with the website just to see who might have it in your area.
MADELINE: OK. Thank you very much.
TOM: You’re very welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
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