Primer, Primer, Primer

We have been working away on the garage clean up. In between coats of paint, I decided I would finally tackle painting the front door. When we moved in, we had to replace the front entry door as the existing door did not fit correctly. It was a simplye pre-primed white steel door (unfortunately, something fancy was not in the budget)!

I decided to use exterior white and interior white based on the side. I also painted all the trim. I set to work cleaning the door and then loosely sanding the surface of the door. I painted all the trim first. Since the door was already primed, I started rolling the door with exterior white (to match our trim) with a small foam door &cabinet roller. The first coat went on great. While waiting for it to dry, something bizarre started happening: I was getting debris when I was rolling. So, I switched to a new roller thinking maybe it was the foam from the roller. No luck.

So I stopped. As time went on... this occurred:

The paint did not adhere to the door AT ALL while the trim looked fantastic. I was frustrated and annoyed! So I turned to google for answers. I read that this is a common problem. Supposedly, pre-primed doors that have been exposed to the elements for more than 30-days need additional primer before paint. Unfortunately, this meant that I have to remove all the paint before I could reprime the door.

Luckily we were able to peel off the majority of the paint but the primer did it's job in other areas and the paint STUCK!

At this point, I decided a trip to Lowe's was in order. I purchased a spray can of Goo Gone and an amazing little 5 in 1 painters tool. We spent about an hour scraping the remaining paint off the door.

The primer did the trick. It still needed two coats of paint to get the job done but things are looking much cleaner and brighter!

On a side note: this weekend we purchased some preprimed MDF from Lowe's to use as a baseboard in our garage. We purchased and immediately came home to paint it. Even with no exposure to the elements, we still experienced an issue with peeling on one of the three baseboards! My new mantra is PRIMER, PRIMER, PRIMER(regardless)!