Little Knights Cot & Furniture paint

Test and Review - Little Knights Cot & Furniture paint

Having tested the gloss I wanted to have a go with this to see if it was suitable for use as a general satin trim paint. Basically, this product is aimed at the domestic market where furniture upcycling and re-purposing is popular. My thinking is, if it's durable enough to be used on a childs cot then it's got to be tough enough to go on skirting boards and doors etc.

So my first test is usually under ideal conditions at home. I take a piece of wood and prepare it in the way I would with any new surface. I then prime it and undercoat it before applying the test paint. The piece is sanded gently between coats to get the optimal finish.

I've previously done a quick test on the Little Knights silk paint which is more designed for use on walls than wood but I wanted to see how it performed. On wood is was ok but there wasn't enough sheen to call it satin which is what I was looking for. The Cot & Furniture paint is slightly different in it's composition though.

The image above is the result of the controlled test and the finish is beautifully silky and not a brushmark in sight. This was paint straight from the tin with no thinning at all. This impressed me enough to take the paint out onto a 'live' job.

I had an average sized room to decorate and it included two doors plus frames, skirting boards and a couple of small window sills. It was going to be a challenge because the room had been the victim of a gas fire that had been venting into the room leaving sooty deposits on the walls and wood. So everything had to be cleaned up and stain blocked. Wood was all cleaned and sanded before having a couple of coats of Zinsser BIN stain blocking primer. The Furniture paint was then applied over that - two coats with a few hours between to dry (suggested recoat time is 4 hours). The opacity is pretty good, I could have almost got away with just one coat in terms of whiteness but a second coat is always going to help build the sheen.

Most of the time I will paint trim before the walls and mask the trim which is more logical and results in nice sharp lines. I put the top coat on at about 3pm one day and stuck a delicate masking tape along the skirting the following morning. This would be a test of adhesion for the paint because at the end of the day I would be pulling that tape off and hoping the paint stayed put - with a new paint I quite often expect to see a few places where the paint comes off with the tape - but not with this. I was pleasantly surprised to find nothing came off at all.

The finish on the doors, frames and skirting was perfect. I had been able to get it on quite thick without any runs or sagging which makes a change from some other water-based paints. And all free of brush marks.

The window sills however, were not as good as I would have liked. The paint hadn't leveled as I wanted. Now this is not necessarily a failing of the product but more about undersanding how it works. On trim one tends to apply the paint and spread it out and then lay it off, the result being the film applied is thinner than might other wise be the case. With window sills I usually 'float' the paint on - which basically means throwing a lot more paint on than I could on a vertical surface because on the sill it can't run anywhere. Clearly with this paint, that isn't the best method because the paint couldn't level enough before it dried. I did a further test at home on my own sills and by adding a little water I got the paint to level off nicely so thinning the product just a little is going to help get the best from it.

In conclusion, I am more than happy to add this product to my stock to use as my regular satin paint. It handles nicely - a lovely creamy consistency, and the finish has a wonderful feel to it. The colour is labeled as 'Pure' and it really is a lovely bright white. Hopefully it stays that way over time.

Currently available in 750ml for £24 direct from Little Knights.