 Melamine is a nightmare to paint. If you've ever tried painting it, you'll know what I'm talking about. MFC, Melamine, Face, Chipboard, probably one of my least favourite products to work with, but it does have its pros and cons. One of the main benefits of it is that it's very hard wearing for like shelves inside cupboards, any kind of washable shelf surface, it's great. The big cons with it is that cutting it without the edge, chipping is not easy. Even with brand new sharp saw blades, you can still get problems with the edge, chipping every now and then you're going to have to use some sort of edge banding as well. And of course the edge banding can end up coming off over time, depending on humidity and a whole load of other factors. So it's not one of my favourite products, but for things like shelves inside cupboards, it does work really well. So my little tip for you today is how to paint Melamine, MFC. And I'm going to show you that on this little unit here from our studio desk that I need to repaint because I don't want it to be white. And it's relatively straightforward. What I generally do when it comes to paint in Melamine is just give it a quick sand because you need to get a bit of a key for the paint to stick to. So this is just a hundred grit sandpaper. Very quick sand. Then quick wipe down, find a cloth. Quick wipe down with a damp cloth. Now this is one of these stages where if this was MDF I would say it just painted. But with MFC you're probably going to want to wait for this to dry or use a piece of tissue or something just to dry it off a bit first because it's not absorbent at all. Your roller will just Skype all around the surface if it's got any water on it or so. So dry it. And then we're back to our friend, the acrylic primer undercoat. And a nice thin coat doesn't need much. A nice thin even coat of acrylic primer. As usual watch your edges that you don't get a buildup of paint. And that's it. We'll let that dry. I can't do the underside until this is dried. It's not going to be easy to pick up. I'm just laying it off at the minute. Very very light on the roller. Usual rules. I like to put the paint on. Give it 30 seconds or so and then lay it off. For a lovely finish. And then once that is completely dried and obviously you've done you the side or whatever. Oh and watch for overhangs of paint like that. Watch for an overhang of paint on the underside. And then we can do the top coat. So this has had overnight the dry now. This is really key. As I said before, melamine isn't absorbent. It's not absorbent. Melamine doesn't absorb stuff. So it will take a lot longer for the paint to dry. So give it overnight. But that's nice and dry now. And I'm just going to use it a decent. I'm using a water-based satin wood paint which is kind of an egg shell type type stuff. But water-based. If you want to use an oil-based that's fine. Oil-based might be a bit more hard-wearing but that's based on no evidence whatsoever. But I'm moving more and more to water-based paints now. So let's go for this. Get your top coat on. Look at how nicely that's taking the paint. And we're going to put two coats of the top coat on as normal with any kind of paint and thing. Always do two coats of top coat. Look at that. Do the edge. And if you've not watched my other videos on painting stuff, don't forget to hit subscribe because this is a topic that comes up quite often. But I've mentioned before what I like to do is put the paint on, leave it for 30 seconds or so and then lay it off. And by lay enough, I mean go over with a very very light roller and barely putting any weight on it at all. And all that does is it helps to pop any bubbles that are in the paint. Always watch out for any buildup of paint on your edges because that's a bit that if you're going to get kind of uneven paint, it's probably going to be around your edges. So just watch out for that. That's it. Let that dry. For your top coats, I would give it a good for water-based paints. Good for a five hours between coats. I don't know what it says on the tin. Let's have a look. Six hours between coats it says on the tin. I've done it much less than that. And that's been absolutely fine. But if you want to allow the full six hours between coats, that's fine. Get your second coat on. That's you done. Bear in mind. Melamine is the work of the devil. It makes all your tools go blunt and it's not the easiest thing in the world to paint. As with any paints, even though it might feel dry to the touch, it doesn't mean that the paint has properly hardened. Water-based paints dry a lot quicker than oil-based paints, but they still need a good few days for the paint to get really hard. Oil-based paints can take good, a couple of weeks for the paint to properly harden. So just because it's dry, the touch doesn't mean it's ready to be used. I would generally say with water-based, try and give it two or three days just for the paint to kind of settle down and harden a bit before you put anything on it that's too heavy. If you're impatient like me and you completely ignore that advice, you might find that things start to stick to your freshly painted objects. You can say though, I've got a perfectly good finish on this melamine and it's pretty hard-wearing. You know, that's me scratching it. I mean, I am leaving marks from my nails. It's a decent good quality finish. Bear in mind. Just bear in mind, you'll never get the paint to be as hard-wearing as the original melamine. At the end of the day, melamine is essentially plastic and paint is paint. So you know, you are going to be able to chip the paint off this if you make a sustained effort. But you know, that's a pretty good finish and for the vast majority of situations, it's probably going to be absolutely fine. All I would say is don't go round repainting all the melamine shelves in your kitchen units because the paint won't withstand the day-to-day abuse shelves in kitchen units. Get. But for shelves on like bookshelves, perhaps for melamine cupboard doors, you'll probably be fine. But again, cupboard kitchen doors, you can sometimes get a really kind of shiny finish on them and that's another whole level of complications for trying to get paint to stick to ultra shiny surfaces like that. Stuff where ornaments are just going to go on it or in this case, it's just paperwork going on it. So there's nothing that's going to scratch it. You should be absolutely fine with what I've suggested in this video, should be. But melamine's a pain in the backside. And this is where we come on to a little bonus tip that I did promise you. As you know, for these, I've just used my bog standard acrylic primer undercoat and it's worked absolutely fine. But if you really want to push it and go for a primer that is more specifically designed for painting melamine and problem surfaces, what I would suggest is John Stone's advanced multi-surface primer. It's specifically designed for problem surfaces. It is expensive. It's about 20 pounds for a little one liter tin and technically it's just a primer. So you should really use an undercoat over the top of it before you're doing your top coats of paint. That's up to you whether or not you bother to do that. But that's a suggested route that you go down. As opposed to this, which is a primer and undercoat in one paint. But you can use that advanced multi-surface primer on all sorts of things like tiles, metal, as I say, melamine. It gives a very, very good bond between the primer and the substrate, the thing that you're painting. Plus you've still got all the advantages of it being a water-based paint as well. If I was doing this job for a customer, that's what I would use. But since this is just for me and it's a my studio room and it's only going to be paperwork that's on it, the Layland acrylic primer undercoat will be absolutely fine. By the way, these are all made by PPG so PPG or well, that's the parent company of Layland and John Stones. I don't know what equivalent paints would be all around the world. Obviously, this is in the UK. Maybe you can get these paints elsewhere in the world. Feel free to pop in the comments if you found really good water-based primers for melamine elsewhere in the world. That's it for today. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. If you're new to the channel, don't forget to hit subscribe. Also remember there's articles detailed articles about pretty much all most of the videos on this channel over on goffith handyman.com. So if you want to go over there, there's a blog and in-depth stuff and I do little updates to the videos and provide a little bit more detail and links to the products and all that sort of thing, all on goffith handyman.com. So get yourself over there. You can also follow me on Instagram and on Twitter and Patreon, of course, there's loads of extra stuff over on my Patreon. Patreon.com. So much goffith handyman. That's it for today. See you next time. Bye!