What is emerald urethane?
I’m going to be giving you my review of Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel. This is one of those cool new paints that purports to behave like an oil paint, being sturdy and just having a certain luster, but have the ease of cleanup of a water-based paint. The general term is alkyd.
If you’d rather read, I’ve written it all out for you, just below the video here. Thank you for watching or reading.
A waterborne alkyd paint is supposed to behave like an oil based paint. According to Golden Boys Painting, alkyd are the modern day descendants of oil paints. All of the big brands of paint carry alkyd paint now.
I think they use the word enamel to indicate how this product looks when finished – it dries to a hard, glassy look. It’s quite lustrous. True enamels actually are molten glass, and that’s where they get their hard sheen – think a piece of kiln fired pottery – but enamel paint – think car paint and nail polish. If you’d like more information, this article has a great history of enamel paints.
I’m not entirely sure if scientifically this emerald urethane trim enamel is any kind of true enamel, but it does dry to a harder and more lustrous finish than any other trim paint I’ve used.
What sheens does emerald urethane trim enamel come in?
I have this in a satin which is the lowest sheen that you can get and it is tinted to a color match with Benjamin Moore’s Cotton Balls.
Emerald Urethane is available in emerald urethane gloss, emerald urethane semi gloss, and emerald urethane satin.
Can the Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane be brushed on?
I’m going to show you how it goes on. It handles a little bit differently, I think, from your typical latex, but all in all I think it’s an excellent choice for trim.
I’ve just got a regular old nylon polyester trim brush and I’ve mixed the paint just with the stir stick and I’m going to paint straight out of the can.
Do you need to use a primer with Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel?
I had primed these baseboards a couple years ago and I’m not going to re-prime. I just primed them and left them and never got around to painting the trim so that’s what I’m going to work on today.
I’m hoping that I will only need one coat of paint on these baseboards since they’ve already been primed. Maybe one and a half.
I talked to the guys at the Sherwin-Williams store and they told me that I shouldn’t need to prime before painting with this product, unless the color is changing drastically.
Here of course I’m painting white over white. In another room I painted a very dark green over white, and I needed two coats for full coverage, but no primer.
This is the Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel freshly coated onto this baseboard. This is one coat right there and it’s looking pretty good. This is a really nice, thick, tough trim paint.
The Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Enamel after its four hours of drying time. Just this little section that I did. It is over one coat of primer. I think the coverage is pretty good. I think I’ll touch up in just a few spots but I won’t do an entire second coat.
Disadvantages of Emerald Urethane
It’s a little bit expensive. I think usually everything at Sherwin Williams Paint is 25 percent off, like, permanently. With that discount it’s like $75 for a gallon, so it’s a little bit more expensive.
It’s very similar to latex but it – I find it a a teeny bit, um, more drippy, a teeny bit more smelly, and it takes a teeny bit longer to dry than your typical latex.
I’m embarrassed to show this, but it – it is – it’s like a paint that drips slowly. So you don’t think you have any drips, and then you look back and you do. So see here on my corners, this is a mess, and I’m gonna have to go back and fix all of this. But other than that, you can see it is, it’s a real nice paint.
The one thing about it is, I do think it is a bit more challenging. Here you go, here’s a mistake I made. It’s a bit more challenging than your typical latex, because it’s quite thick, and I found that if I didn’t really watch what I was doing, I would get these drips.
Like I would paint this, and it would look fine, but then since the paint is so thick there was more on the brush than I realized and I’d look back, like after I’d moved on, like to over here, and I’d be like, oh my gosh I’m getting a drip, how is that possible. Just be mindful it’s quite thick, and a little goes a very, very, long way.
Benefits of Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel
This is the Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel in satin in the color Rookwood Shutter Green, which is a lot darker. It took two coats to do the trim in this room.
Here’s what it looks like up close. It does have this great sort of hardness to it. It’s is a gorgeous looking trim. A wonderful, low satin sheen. It’s soft and smooth to the touch. It just looks tough and it has held up beautifully. It’s a durable finish.
I do think that oil paints are the best for durability and beauty, but they’re hard to handle, stinky and a total headache to clean up. They also take forever to dry and to cure, and if you’ve got a small child in your house, waiting that long for paint to dry might be impossible.
Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel dries in four hours, cures fully in 30 days, and cleans up with water. All in all, I think Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel is a wonderful paint and a strong alternative to oil-based paints.
A great wall paint to go with this trim paint is Farmhouse Finishes Milk Paint. For more paint inspiration, check out my posts on Annie Sloan chalk paint.