How To Paint A Ceiling - Brushing & Rolling

Hey out there again. Welcome to this How To Paint A Ceiling - Brushing & Rolling blog post here on our Cheap Calgary Painting internet website. This post is designed to help you guys and girls out there who are potential painting customers to paint houses and get professional results for less. Today we are going to be showing you how to paint your ceiling. Ceiling Painting isn't too hard. It's the place to start any Interior Painting project. By sure you take care of all Drywall Repairs before starting.

And I know what might almost sound redundant but listen. There are a lot of really great tips that you need to have, so that hey, you do it right, see it looks amazing, and see you don't hurt your neck or break your house or home. So one of the most basic skill sets that any home renovators gonna need is to know how to paint a ceiling and do a nice job of it. 

Because there are a lot of ways that you can really make a mess of your house if you don't know how to paint a ceiling properly. We've all seen the house before right. The smooth ceiling, lots of pot lights, patches everywhere, lines everywhere. Yes there is the secret to get a job done without having any of that ugly stuff showing and it makes it look like one clean finish. 

And I'm not talking about spraying. I'm talking about brush and roller. And I'm gonna show you all that secret today. We are dealing with brand-new construction today. So painting your ceiling is the same in new construction as it is if you are doing a just a rework. But the process is almost identical except in this situation we have to add the sanding of the drywall work and priming the drywall before we get into painting the ceiling. 

And that's really simple. I like using these little blue sponges with the curve on it. All right these things are awesome because I can get right into my corners without putting a scratch line. I've seen a lot of these things, and they're square on both ends. If you put that up here like this and then drag it across I'll show you what happens.

How To Paint A Ceiling With A Roller.

You end up with a line on your ceiling. Okay, that's not something you want to have there. So buy one of these angle sanding sponges, and then you can hit both those corners and make it look pretty. The only other secret you need is to make sure that all your edges are feathered. It's like really feathered to a point where I guess misty cloud. 

Okay there's no definitive line in your drywall mud to your drywall. Once you get that accomplished you're ready to go. The only other thing. Take your 360 sander, put it up on your joints. All right and go opposite direction that you put the mud on. Just to change the texture of the mud. Now this is really important because the paper is really smooth so the mud isn't always as smooth as you think it is. 

And just by the way like this nice and easy. You'll put a little bit of sanding on it, change the texture, mud, and now it's ready to be painted. When you're priming. Now I love this rig for sure. When you're Priming And Painting Drywall you want to make sure you're not using too much pressure, but you are using pressure okay. You're pushing this paint into the drywall. 

Don't use so much pressure that you are risking popping the screws and making huge paint lines. And don't run the roller right into that corner. Because you're gonna end up marking up your paint on the corresponding wall okay. Finish for the gentle touch. Back rolling. And you won't have any lines. The other secret is prime in the same direction that you're going to want to be painting with your finished paint. 

Remember when we paint ceilings, we can do two coats. So the second coat, you want to be paint in the same direction as your second coat. And that's going to be determined by a couple of different things. Generally when I'm painting a ceiling or doing ceiling painting, if I have a window that's facing south, then I want to make sure if the Sun is pouring through a window that I'm finishing the paint in the same direction as the sun. 

How To Paint A Ceiling Without Streaks.

So if there is any little lines or ridges, even run the microscopic level Sun thrown across the ceiling will highlight it with a shot. So if the sun's poring in your window, paint towards the sun. And if it's not, going the longest wall in the room. That's a great way to do it. Get started now. The only other thing you need to know about priming is make sure you let this stuff dry for a good couple of hours before you start doing any touch-up work. 

It might be dry to the surface, but if you put a knife with mud up there, and start scraping around and trying to do your touch-up in your prime check, well, this is still damp. You're gonna make it a heck of a mess in your ceiling, and we don't want that. There we go. So now we're all primed, and we got to figure it out. Let's move on and we'll talk about how to do a prime check and make sure your ceiling is ready to be painted before you paint. 

All right, so once we're done our primer, we want to jump right into doing the prime check as soon as it's dry for about two hours. And that's as simple as just taking a little bit of mud, and a spotlight, and going all around your surface and checking for imperfections. Now you're gonna find them everywhere you go. Sanding is not the art of making everything smooth it's the art of getting rid of all of your ridges and blending your joints to your drywall paper. 

So the reason we do a prime check before we paint a ceiling is this, and this goes holds true whether it's a new construction, or you're painting a ceiling in an existing space. You always want to go by and check things out, and the prime check does two things for you. One, it fixes all of your mistakes, and, two, it fixes all the mistakes that nobody else bothered to fix. Okay don't take it for granted that because your ceiling looks pretty good that it's all good to go because this is atrocious. 

So I'm gonna just use a standard trouble light, comes on usually like a 25 foot cord, 100 watt bulb, and that'll show me all of my mistakes. So now you can see all the little pits and nicks and scratches. Now they're all smooth. They've all been sanded right. So now we just try to take our compound and slide ourselves over here.

How To Paint A Ceiling Without Making A Mess.

And this is just a result. Bulkheads are really brutal right. Because you're Drywall Taping an outside corner, you're drywall taping an inside corner. Usually this area here it's gonna get a combination of, or not enough mud. That's just the way it is. All kinds are very normal that way. You can use a regular mud when you're doing your touch-ups, or you can use a compound with a hardener. 

I'm gonna suggest if you use the hardener they'll save you from having to do any priming afterwards but today I'm using regular mud. Because I find that a lot of people don't know where to find hardener or are unable to get it. When it reads on, where they live, so we have a company called CGC, and they make a 45-minute mud and that mud allows me to do all this and then not have to prime. 

If you want to see that process it's in our other drywall touch ups painting blog post which you may have seen already. There we go. So that's it. We just fix that up, give this an hour or two to dry, and here's the deal. If I can't see it with this light, it doesn't matter what time of day it is, how much lighting you have, what time of year it is.

You know, in the fall, sometimes the winter, the before o'clock you get really strange low-light. This covers up every single imperfection you're gonna find, so that when you paint your ceiling, you know it's gonna be perfect. And you're not gonna be disappointed two three weeks or three months down the road there's a certain time a day you're sitting there and you look up and go my god what an ugly ceiling. 

It happens to everybody. So don't be fooled. All right. Especially in your buying a new house. All the ceilings look great because they use a really boring flat white paint, and they always take you through at a time of day when you can't tell how bad the paint job is. But this will solve all your problems now let's get on with the painting. So we're just about to jump into the painting. 

How To Paint A Ceiling Like A Pro.

But I want to show you this real quick. This is my prime check touch-up area and I need to give it a quick little scuff here. There we go. Drop the mic we're done. Now my spots need to be primed because I use regular mud. Instead of using a regular primer having to wait 20 minutes half an hour I'm gonna use this because this sucker here boom done in three minutes ready to go so great product. 

Recommend using it all the time. I've been using this stuff since I was old enough to use spray paint, so when doing a new ceiling I'm gonna give you an industry secret here. And that's this paint right here. It doesn't look like much, it's not a very set again, but the reality is this is a ceiling paint. It's incredibly flat, it has no acrylic additive which is what you see in paint that gives it to the shine and the sheen. 

So without the acrylic additive in this what you get is a perfect blended painted surface where you don't see any lines. Also gives you the ability if you have it mixed properly to go do touch-ups at a later date and it's almost invisible. So when you buy this have them shake it for you at the paint store, bring it home, and use it right away. 

If you let it sit around for a couple days all the additives start to separate and then you're gonna get inconsistencies with your finished product and you won't be able to do any touch-ups now. 1105 everyone got to pick one of these up. What I'm doing is I'm just going to be putting it into my tray. I'm usually a regular roller, and I know there are roller systems out there they're a lot faster. 

But we're demonstrating for homeowners how to paint a ceiling inside of their houses, so there's a lot of painting contractors. I have different systems that are a little bit faster but that equipment takes a while to set up, and clean up. And you can only use it when you're painting a lot of stuff. This rig right here traditional roller, 15 millimeter nap. 

How To Paint A Ceiling Without Getting It On The Walls.

I'm gonna call that half inch, with a tray liner, a regular tray, a 3-inch brush, and you can paint every room in your house. Okay the only difference is, you have to wash again. Now I'm using a long extension pole today. And generally it's not necessary to have a long pole to paint the ceiling. I mean I have a nice little two to four foot pole and that would work fine. 

But what this does, this pole allows me to paint my ceiling, they keep my hands nice and low. Okay so when I'm painting a ceiling I don't have my hands above my heart, and that's really key to not straining yourself. There's gonna be a long day painting a basement, and if I'm up here like this a my arms are gonna get fatigued, but it's gonna cause my heart to work way too hard. 

So I just take it easy and I keep my hands nice and low and I can paint my ceiling with these. And I'm not straining with a small little stick. Okay so of course we have to load it up. In this situation these windows in this area are facing north so we're not gonna get direct sunlight blowing through here so we're gonna paint along well first just because when you paint a really long wall it's easier to keep the paint wet on a short wall. 

So for my second coat I want to make my life easy and have the short distance. Okay if I have a little bit of drawing and overlapping on the first coat, it's not going to show through as bad as if it's on the second coat, so all I do is I extend my pole get myself comfortable. There we go right into the corner and ran back nice here we go. 

So basically my process is this. I've rolled the long wall, and then I'll come and cut, and then I'll give it an out an hour and a half, quicksand with my 360 sander, and then they'll cut and then roll do it in the reverse order. When you do your first coat you'll find that you don't have much of a cut to do after you roll so it's nice to just get the rolling done. 

How To Paint A Ceiling Fan.

And let the paint start drying because when I stand I want the paint to be nice and dry before I put a sander up there, and I'm not saying right into the crevices. So if I cut after I roll on the first coat and then I wait about an hour I can cut the ceiling and by the time I'm done cutting the ceiling it's been almost an hour and a half since I actually painted the ceiling. 

Then I'm ready to sand it real quick and then roll. So the goal here is to paint long even strokes okay. Because the longer you roll it out, there we go, the more you can keep your edges wet. All right the edge of the paint at the front here, this is the line you want to keep wet all the time. And so you want to paint one half and then switch to the other half. 

Now because the paint doesn't have any acrylic in it, it actually helps to facilitate painting the whole room without getting any dry lines. Okay if you like a shinier surface, you have to be really careful and really quick, but I like this because it's not a very fast process. You get a lot of work done in a short amount of time with very little effort and then at the end of the day even if you're making a little mistake this paints so good it's gonna hide it all for anyway.

One of the thing I'm going to point it is the direction of the cage. You'll see that the rod is here on the lead edge. That's because there's more pressure here than on the backside and I want to have the pressure up at the front. All right. Now when you're painting your ceiling finish coat, you're not using a lot of pressure. But still it helps to eliminate the lines if you have it facing in the right direction. 

So roll it out. There we go. And then finish off like that. Boom. Now you can imagine how much effort would be involved in doing this ceiling if you're holding on to that paint roller and standing on a ladder. Up and down, and up and down, paint in every direction. This makes this entire job relatively quick and really painless. 

How To Paint A Ceiling Properly.

So here's the reason why I'm using a single gallons of paint for my ceiling and I'm doing an entire basement here. All right. So I could have bought a five-gallon pail. But here's what happens when you open the five-gallon pail and you start pouring it out. By the time you finish all of the projects there's so much air going into that pail that now the paint's starting to dry and get little crumbs and dirt in it. 

So what I like to use is one gallon at a time. I'll pour three quarters of a gallon into my paint tray use the rest as my cutting can. And now it's easy to run around and just touch this up. Make sure that everything is coated. Don't get lazy with this, and only do it on the second coat. It will show and you'll see a dark line around your ceiling. 

So make sure you get your cutting done, and then it's a great time to go for coffee, and then come back we'll cut again, and then roll the short side, then the ceilings done. One last little thing. If you have a trapdoor in your ceiling for the shutoff valve for your tap outside, make sure you paint it. This is a plastic in a lot of cases, and it looks great today. 

But in a couple years after that UV light that bounces around outside and comes through the windows hits this it'll end up turning yellow. So give it a good little paint job. Hit all four sides. Roll and set it on the ground to dry. We're back from coffee break which turned into lunch you know this happens when we get together. 

Listen here's the rest of the system. We've got our first coat completed. Now and like I said, if you don't take a whole lunch break, then you can move a lot faster. But do the cut first for the second coat. All right, so that's just as simple as getting your brush wet and then making it dry after. I'm done in the cutting in. I'm gonna take my sander pole, give it a quick scuff, and then another coat okay. 

How To Paint A Ceiling Benjamin Moore.

So here's my radius 360 sander. Huh let's get rid of the old sheet that's covered and drywall dust. Before you sand your paint you want to have a nice clean sheet. This is a 220 for everybody who's asking what I'm using done self-adhesive okay this is brilliant. And like I said don't go right into the corners really what we're doing here is we're not trying to scuff it up to make the paint stick or anything like that. 

We're passing over the general surface to make sure if there's any little hairs or little chunks of dirt that they're gone. You can't see everything in every kind of light so it's better to assume that something up here needs to be sanded off than to assume that everything's perfect. Here we are just a quick pass over the general area good practice. 

So I just thought what a little nugget that I had to get rid of that's awesome alright. I agree the first time I ever painted a ceiling that my god I was young and stupid and I didn't know the right way to do it so I was using a short stick like this. Yeah how much paint. There was a big commercial space and it's been painting for eight hours straight like this where the pigs got foam. 

How much I think it must've been about twenty-two just young and dumb and I got home and I woke up the next morning I couldn't move my head that's it Painter. I'll see is that my body basically said okay you're done for the day we need another day to recover from whatever stupidity were involved in the night before. Crazy all right. 

Whoo yeah let's go see bump bump bump is like CSI here. Look at every one of these little spots. That's a chunk that was on the ceiling. That would have cast a shadow. Now they're not gonna be a problem okay. So now we're gonna go to the opposite direction. Same process. Get the cage pointing the direction that you're heading. 

How To Paint A Ceiling With A Sprayer.

Don't roll right into the corner just gentle pressure now that the ceiling is all sealed up with the primer in the first coat this paint is gonna sit on the surface a lot nicer. And you'll find that the lead edge will stay wetter a lot longer. Do some back rolling now that I mention it. Back rolling is this. You're rolling this this part of the ceiling here right. 

Stretch your paint out and then go backwards over the joint put the middle of the joint in the middle of your roller right there. And then slowly come forward. There we go. Constantly leaving that pressure on the front of your roller so you don't get lines on the ceiling in behind. I'm just gonna do this about 25 more times. 

And we're often yeah well that pretty much wraps up all the information I've got on how to paint a ceiling. Remember try to keep your hands low. Take your time. Watch for marks. And happy painting. Alright and if you want to sit around and watch me paint the rest the ceiling because you find it somehow relaxing and soothing then go right ahead.

For the best of the best results, you are likely much better off hiring in a professional interior house painter to complete your ceiling painting. You can paint a ceiling with a brush and roller or you can paint a ceiling with a spray painting machine. You will get superior results spray painting in your ceiling compared to brushing and rolling in your ceiling.

How To Paint A Ceiling With A Brush.

The professional ceiling painters over at 1/2 Price Pro Calgary Painting can very likely help you save some time and save you some money on professional ceiling painting. Be it a brush and roll ceiling painting finish you are after, or a higher quality ceiling painting finish, our professional Calgary Painters can very likely help you save money and get some of the best of the best professional ceiling painting results your hard earned dollars can buy.