Paint Doesn’t Stick to Plastic

You are looking a the plastic escutcheon / decorative cover to hide plumbing pipes under this pedestal sink.
Someone painted it the same color as the wall, and with the same wall paint.

Only problem is, most paints won’t stick to plastic. Plastic is too slick.
That’s why now the paint is peeling off with just the slightest tug or tension. It’s peeling away like a snake shedding his skin.

There are some solutions for this. For starters, the plastic could have been sanded, to give the paint some “tooth” and something to grab ahold of. There are also primers that will adhere to plastic and prepare it to take the paint.
Even simpler, there are paints formulated to stick to plastic. Krylon makes some, and I’ve used it on my outdoor lawn chairs; it’s held up nicely for about 20 years.

Industrial Modern Comes to West U

The first photo shows this master bedroom in the West University neighborhood of Houston after I have smoothed the bottom portion of the wall below the chair rail and primed.

A softer, yet slightly industrial look is brought by the ostrich skin-looking wallpaper, in a color that coordinates nicely with the wall paint. Note the intermittent horizontal lines.

The wallpaper is by Arte. It is 36″ wide, is sold by the yard, and comes in one continuous bolt, this one being 22′ yards. It is a non-woven material. It was nice enough to work with. I pasted the paper, but it could have been hung by pasting-the-wall instead.

It has a high fiberglass content – and I can attest to that, because by the end of the day, my fingers had been stabbed many times.

That fiberglass makes it easy to strip off the wall later, and also makes it “dimensionally-stable,” meaning that it doesn’t expand when it gets wet with paste, and won’t twist or warp while you are working with it.