New woodworker looking for finishing advice

[Aaron Wakeling]

ONLY use waterborne finishes, lacquer or shellac on surfaces of the box that will be inside when the lid is closed. Acyrlic enamel would be just OK, waterborne wall paint not, but Oil based (alkyd) enamel will be much better--easier to apply and more durable.

Sorry youve got me confused now with all these different types of finishes. I didnt realise there were so many different types of paints. Ive only ever painted walls and used latex paint. Are you saying if I paint the outside and inside of the box I should use a different type of paint?

Here's my thinking - if you paint the interior, in a few years the boys are gonna outgrow it and your SO might want to repurpose it. She'll look inside and see all the scratches, nicks, and chips from toys being chunked in and you'll be asked to repaint. If you leave it natural, the nicks, etc won't show so bad and maybe can even be passed off as character marks.

My SO does want the inside of the box to be either stained and poly or just poly but unfortunately there are a few defects on the inside of the plywood that I was hoping to hide with filler and paint over. Maybe I should just accept that its a toy box and will get dinged up more inside and not many people are gonne see the defects on the inside.

I built this for my daughter:

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I used several steps. I used General Finishes red milk paint followed by GF High Performance Semi-Gloss on the inside. The outside I chose to use several steps to produce an antique look. I started with GF black milk paint, then I distressed it. I followed up with a bright red glaze, then a coat of amber shellac, and finally several coats of GF High Performance satin. Oh, and I used black flocking for the tray bottoms. 2 red oak shallow trays stack on each other and one red oak deep tray is divided in half. All ride on red oak rails.

That is a very nice build. I hope mine turns out that nice.

[John TenEyck]

You have and will get disagreement among those of us offering advise. But I'm very sure we will all agree on advising you NOT to use latex wall paint. It is very soft and not suitable for furniture. One of it's glaring deficiencies is that it "blocks", meaning that if you set something on top of it chances are it will stick to it (and form a block). That's not a problem for wall paint since you can't set anything on top of it, but it's a real problem for furniture, shelves, and toy chests.

Now back to my personal biases. Oil based products are fine, I suppose, but they are slow to dry, stink while they do, and continue to stink for weeks or months thereafter. Other than that they are great! Waterborne products suffer none of those disadvantages and the good ones are nearly or just as durable as the best oil based paints. Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore make very good furniture grade waterborne paints - that's why I recommended you go to one of them.

Now for the trump card. You have a 1 year old, right? Do you want him breathing the solvents coming off oil based paint? Didn't think so.

John