I have always wanted a paint sprayer. To me, the difference between a professional and non-professional job on a project is in the brush strokes. When I got the chance to try out the Graco HV2900 paint sprayer I was super excited. Here’s what this baby looks like.
My thought was that I wanted to re-do my cabinets, but I wanted to try this out on a smaller scale first. I bought an old ugly desk for $20 to use as a sewing desk. I don’t have a great before picture, but here’s a while-sanding-it picture.
The drawers looked like this with wooden handles and you can see the original color.
Well, after a lot of sanding, painting, and after getting new hardware…….it looks like this!
I love it. Let me show you how it all went down and tell you about the sprayer too.
The veneer was peeling up in places so it needed to be glued back down.
The desk also had some cracks in the top that needed to be filled.
After a lot of sanding and prep work, we broke out the sprayer. The paint needs to be thinned a little in order to work. The sprayer comes with a cup that you run the paint through to test its thickness of it.
If all the paint hasn’t dripped out by a given amount of time then your paint is still too thick.
It didn’t take a lot of water to get the right consistency – just a bit. The desk got two coats of paint. I bought the sample cans of Martha Stuart paint which were being cleared out for $1, so I spent $4 total on the gray paint.
Then I added two metallic stripes. I used a nice brush for the stripe because I didn’t think watering down the metallic paint to spray it was a good idea.
After this, we thought we’d add a coat of polyacrylic to seal it off and give it a satin finish. The polyacrylic worked really well in the sprayer and didn’t even need to be watered down.
However, using polyacrylic was a big mistake. For some reason, it caused the old polyurethane from the desk to resurface even though we had sanded it like crazy. The whole thing looked yellowed and I was pretty bummed. (In hindsight, we probably should have used a really good primer to seal it off before the painting.)
No worries. I taped off the gold stripe and we sprayed a new coat of gray over the top. We decided to leave it at that since the color underneath would be gray even if it chipped a little. The hardware actually ended up costing a little more than the desk itself, but I think it makes the project.
I am so excited about the desk. We have an office on the main floor where the piano sits, but recently my husband gave in to my pleas and we switched things up. We sold our dining room table (because we’ve used it twice ever) and put the piano there instead.
I get to use the office now and I am thrilled! It’s not in the freezing cold basement and it’s bright and happy. There will be more office projects to come. Woo-hoo!
Okay, so here’s my opinion on the Graco HV2900. Here’s what rocks about it:
– It comes with a nice manual and DVD to make it easy to use.
– It’s lightweight and the hose is long enough for you to reach pretty far.
– You can easily adjust the nozzle to spray vertically, horizontally, or just as a circular shot.
– It doesn’t require an air compressor. I have everything you need already for the project.
– It coats nicely and evenly.
– You can adjust how much paint you want to spray out of it.
– The clean-up is way easier than you’d think. Rinse and run it with water and then take apart a few small parts and rinse them individually.
Frankly, there’s not much I didn’t like. It sounds like a loud vacuum, but that’s to be expected. It would be nice if the paint cup was a little bigger. Overall I give the Graco HV2900 paint sprayer two thumbs up. I already have another project lined up for it. It’s not going to be getting much rest around here 🙂
Watch the following video for more information:
Thanks for reading.
Here you can see the list of the best selling Graco paint sprayers available on Amazon: