Problem: Flaking ceiling paint. I want to repaint the ceilings in my 50 year old house with plaster walls and ceiling, but I can’t figure the best way to prep the ceilings as the 50 year old paint undernweath continues to flake off exposing bare plaster. There are no leaks or moisture problems in the attic above. Short of paint remover is there any way to remove the remainder of the paint or seal it prior to painting. I have previously used good quality water based primers and ceiling paint, but the old stuff underneath keeps peeling.
p.s. I believe the ceiling was originally painted with a milk base paint.
Thanks
Edited 2/17/2008 11:09 am ET by kensington
Replies
You probably have calcamine paint on the ceiling. I've run into that quite a bit. Once it starts losing adhesion, it's a real pain to get new paint to stick.
What I usually do is put up a new 1/2" sheetrock ceiling right over the old plaster. Use long roofing nails, or DW screws, into the beams. Tape and spackle, and you're ready for a nice, fresh paint job. Plus you get rid of any cracks in the ceiling.
Thanks for a good solution Shep.
Kensington
Edited 2/23/2008 7:02 pm ET by kensington
http://www.plasterlord.com/notebook/fcalcimine.htm
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A-holes. Hey every group has to have one. And I have been elected to be the one. I should make that my tagline.
Bill, Thanks for the thorough answer to the problem of calcimine paint on ceilings. Even though the house was built in 1951 it was a tract house like everyone in the neighborhood with small differences and it makes sense that they used this kind of paint with the fresh plaster.
Thanks
I just did a ceiling like this. I spent several hours scraping the ceiling in a small room. I went around tapping almost every square inch looking for any area that might be poorly adhered.
Then, a coat of oil primer, at which point, I discovered still more areas that continued to peel. There weren't too many, so I just removed whatever flaked off and continued painting. Everything was covered with plastic or tarps so wet flakes of paint were only a problem when I needed to leave the room.
My customer actually likes the look of a "rustic" ceiling so once the oil primer dried, 2 topcoats of ceiling paint and I was done. In all, the ceiling took me about 1 1/2 days instead of the usual 1/2 day.
If I were going to try to make the ceiling smooth (this particular one never was smooth), I would skim coat as needed and hit it again with another coat of oil primer before painting. I have found that when spackle is applied over oil and then painted, I sometimes get bubbles/blistering in the spackle. I think it's because the oil creates a good moisture barrier and the water in the paint can only move in one direction.
Thanks for the experience. Two of our bedrooms are like your example as I did close to the same thing. But in the living room I want a smooth ceiling so it looks like I'll have to spend the time or find an experienced painter who's willing to do it.
Don
I just experienced the blistering of new paint over spackling over the oil based paint.
Very frustrating because I had no idea what to do, and neither did my paint company.
My solution was exactly what you do, but I wish I knew before attempting to scrape everything down prime, spackle and paint just to have it peel again.
My last attempt was prime, spackle, sand, re-prime and then the final coat did not blister.
I should have asked the question here and you would have solved it for me!!! Shucks, just chewed up about 12 man hours. Will never get them back but I learned something so oh well.
The first time it happened to me, it was only very small patches that I had spackled so it was relatively east to fix. I had used an acrylic primer and topcoated with no problem. It was the 2nd topcoat that caused the blistering.
The guys at my paint store didn't know what was going on either so apparently it doesn't happen that terribly often.
It's the kind of thing that's easy to forget about until it happens again. So my rule of thumb to avoid this problem in the future is to simply stick with the same primer for every coat.
Yep. That is exactly what I am going to do. I used Zinnzer's primer, I want to say top coat or something like that, and I will stick with that cause it worked.
Not a big fan of stinking up a clients home like that but not willing to go thru that again if I can help it.
Patience is a virtue with this one, but what I do is take a razor scraper like the kind used to remove wall paper, and just work away at it until I can't remove any more. It takes some time, but not as much time as covering it with drywall would. Then I prime it with Kilz - the orginal stinky stuff, not the water based.
I've done this on several jobs (back in my paintin' daze) and not one has had any further issues that I know of.
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Thanks for the first hand experience Ted. I did that on the bedrooms. Great for muscles that would not otherwise be used that way.