Painting the walls of your RV can transform it from a dated travel trailer to a modern tiny home on wheels. Sounds nice, right? Slow your roller. Before you get too excited let me give you a reality check and 4 TIPS on how to paint RV Walls that won’t make you go nuts or break the bank.

 

When we completely renovated and painted the interior of our fifth wheel, we thought painting would be the easy part. After all, reno images from Instagram and Pinterest flooded our social media feeds. Magically, it seemed, dark, dated RV walls were replaced with bright, modern interiors. And, how hard could it be, right? After all, an RV is roughly the size of a studio apartment. 

Oh, the hubris.

We budgeted four days to paint, got one gallon of wall paint, a gallon of primer, some cabinet paint and a ton of tape. The sun was out, the music was bumping and our spirits were high! But as the days wore on and our materials vanished, our buzz was truly killed.

A month later, bone-weary and cash-poor, we finally achieved the results we imagined. It took four times longer than we anticipated, required double the paint, and gave us a hearty education in what works and does not work when painting. 

But here’s the good news: painting your RV is totally worth it. 

 

Nothing updates an RV like paint. After we applied a light-colored acrylic, our home looked twice as big as it had before. I would absolutely do it again, but would follow these tips.

 

SET YOUR EXPECTATIONS

RVs are not constructed like homes. Instead of having perfectly angled corners and paint-ready drywall, RV walls are generally made of wood-board covered with vinyl paper. Paint can’t just be slapped on and finished in a day. The surface needs to be prepped before applying paint, and even then, RV walls require a lot of paint. You will need to purchase more paint than you would painting an equivalent space in a house.

Why do RV manufacturers insist on turning out rigs with interiors straight out of 1976?

While going through our reno, we discovered our rig was riddled with gaps, dents, crevices and strange angles. These problems faded into the interior when the walls were brown and beige but were glaring when the walls were white. Personally, I always thought RV manufacturers produced dark interiors because they hide dirt. Now I think it’s because darkness hides flaws created in the rush to mass produce. When you paint or renovate, trust me, you will discover astonishing, face-palm slapping, head-shaking, straight-up weirdness. Curse it out and keep going. You can still get the results you want.

PREP IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP

I know you don’t wanna, but you have to put time into prep if you want your results to look great and hold up over time and travel. Below, I lay out every step we took – and didn’t take – to get our finished results.

REMOVE STUFF. I don’t just mean your throw pillows. Remove the lenses over your lights and the outlet covers. Remove hinges, doorknobs and anything else that can be hit by flying paint. Trust me on this, paint is hell to get out of a window screen. 

REPAIR HOLES. RV walls don’t play nice. When you pull out a nail, part of the paper and board will rise up, creating what looks like a tiny ant-hill. Smacking the hill with a hammer doesn’t work. In our experience, you need to shave off the concave material with a razor blade then fill the hole with a wood-filler or caulk. Let that dry, then sand the area until you don’t feel any paper edges or splinters of wood sticking out.

SCRUB THE WALLS. Look…I didn’t want to either and went through all the justifications you might be going through now. Clean the walls anyway. Why? Because RV walls get dirty just going down the road or using a fan. If you don’t clean them first, paint will not adhere or fade over time.

 

Ready to gag? Use a white rag to clean the walls and you’ll see how much dirt has been lurking on those beige walls all along.

TSP is a common pre-paint cleaner, but we didn’t want a chemical that strong in our tiny space with a pet. Instead we used Krud Kutter which can be sprayed directly on the walls then wiped off without rinsing. You spray it on, wipe it off, then wipe it off again.

REMOVE THE MANUFACTURERS NON PAINTABLE CAULK 

It seemed like a dirty trick. Like we were being punked. When we started painting we didn’t know clear, non-paintable silicone caulk (AKA The Blob) was lurking everywhere.

Hear me now: if I can warn you about one time-sucking hazard, this is it. We found this *bleep* everywhere. In a house, caulk is generally applied in a thin line along the corners of sinks and countertops. This is not the case in an RV.

Our manufacturer must have used a bazooka caulk gun to spray clear silicone haphazardly and in the most unlikely places. And here’s the problem: it’s hard to see and you can’t paint over it. We didn’t see it when we started painting and this alone added about 20 hours to our reno. We applied the first coat of paint, only to come back 15 minutes later to find the paint pooling and separating  along door jambs and on our kitchen walls.

Run your hands around your walls, across molding and under cabinets. The silicone feels smoother than the wall and might have a slight shine. If you’re lucky, and caulk is only applied  just where it should be, you can cover the existing caulk with siliconized acrylic paintable caulk before painting, If not, you’ll have to remove it all before painting — like we did. 

You can buy solvents that remove caulk, but we didn’t know how these chemicals would work on wood and paper, so instead we removed it by hand. You can see how we did it in this video.

ADD CAULK. I know, I know. After all the heinous caulk removal, I’m telling you to add more? Yes. a paintable acrylic caulk and a caulk gun became my besties during this process. RV walls are uneven. As you prep, you will find gaps that could range from ⅛ of an inch to a half-inch, especially around door jambs and under cabinets. Caulk can fill and smooth these areas before you apply paint. Look Mom, no holes!

READY TO SAVE TIME? HERE ARE THREE THINGS WE DIDN’T NEED TO DO

SAND? NOPE. A lot of RV renovators suggest the next prep-step is to sand the walls because sanding creates a scratched surface to which primer and paint will better adhere. We did test patches with and without this step and found we didn’t need to sand the walls (you might want to do a test yourself, as some RV walls are rough already and some are shiny). Our final result looked just the same without sanding.

PRIME? NOPE. I thought we needed a primer. After all, RV walls aren’t paint-friendly surfaces and primers are meant to help paint adhere. I began our project in the bathroom where I applied a coat of bonding primer. Then another and another, until four coats had been applied.  The walls seemed to just eat the primer, providing no base for the paint. Finally, I painted over the primer, but that also required four coats (waiting, of course, for each coat to dry completely before applying another). 

I collapsed into a camp chair at the end of that week and considered quitting. How on Earth could I finish painting the whole house if the bathroom took a week? But then, I discovered two things: Kilz Tribute paint and paint-rollers with a heavy nap. We took the time to do a wall test where we primed and painted one section, then just painted another without primer underneath. It turns out, with Kilz Tribute, the primer was not needed.

If, however, you plan to paint your cabinets, like we did, you must sand and prime! We followed these steps: sand, clean, prime then paint. We used Nuvo cabinet paint in Titanium. The results were stunning. You can watch us do this in this video.

TAPE? NOPE. Oh, we taped, but I wish we hadn’t. Taping added hours and hours of work. If I could go back and do it again I wouldn’t even buy painters tape. Why? Because RV walls aren’t flush; they are literally constructed to “float” for travel. We would apply the tape at one temperature and come back to find the tape stuck in a crack as the walls expanded. To make things worse, we couldn’t remove the tape while the paint was still wet because the walls required several coats which had to dry in-between applications. When we removed the tape, it took some of the paint up with it, creating more work. Luckily, about half-way through the project, we stopped using tape and instead used a high quality edging brush and took off errors with paint wipes. 

YOU’RE FINALLY READY TO PAINT!

 After all the prep, painting your RV walls is actually the easy part…if you use the right materials.  See all of the supplies we used HERE.

First, use a thick paint with a built-in primer. We used Kilz Tribute which saved us the time and expense of priming the walls. Be warned, however, that you’ll need more paint than you might imagine. You might need several coats to get the finish you want; we painted Bright White over beige walls and it took three coats.

Second, use a roller with the thickest nap you can find. These furry rollers not only hold more paint, they get into the grooves and texture found on most RV walls. When we switched from styrofoam to a thick nap, we cut our painting time in half.

WHAT TO EXPECT AFTER YOU PAINT

It’s done and every muscle in your body hurts, but wow your house looks great! But will it hold up?

The wall and cabinet paint we used hasn’t scratched or faded at all. It still looks amazing and after the fatigue wore-off we were happy we did the work.

There is one pesky piece of maintenance you might need to do, however, especially as you travel. The line of paint between our ceiling molding and walls did begin to crack a bit as we drove. No worries. We kept our extra paint in little air-tight paint containers with brushes inside to touch up these cracks as they appeared. After the first year, the growing pains were over and we haven’t done a touch-up sense.

 

You can watch our full-reno video HERE and our video dedicated to paint HERE.