Ceiling Painting

The Hardest Surface in the House to Paint Well

A ceiling is lit worse than any wall in the room and it is looked at from further away, which sounds like it should make the work forgiving. It does the opposite. Light from a window rakes across a ceiling at a shallow angle for most of the day, and a shallow angle finds every roller lap, every patch edge, every place where the texture stops and starts. A wall gets light square on and hides a multitude. A ceiling puts your work on a projector.

That is before you get to the fact that most of the ceilings we paint in Pasadena are lime plaster on wood lath. Plaster is not flat. It was never flat. It was floated by hand eighty or a hundred years ago by someone working fast, and it has moved since with every dry season and every small settlement. A modern flat white paint over an old plaster ceiling shows all of that, which is why the sheen choice on a ceiling is not really a choice at all. Dead flat, every time. Anything with the faintest sheen turns the undulation into a landscape.

What We Actually Do Up There

We start by clearing the room or, where the furniture is staying, covering everything and tenting it. Ceiling paint spatters. Anyone who tells you their roller does not is using a very short nap on a very smooth ceiling and will not get the coverage a textured one needs.

Then the surface. Cracks in plaster get opened out and filled in coats rather than packed in one pass, because a deep fill shrinks as it dries and drops a hairline back through your new paint. Nail pops and screw pops in the drywall ceilings get refastened beside the old fixing first. Anywhere a stain has been sealed, the primer edge is sanded back so there is no ridge sitting under the finish, since a ridge is exactly the kind of thing that shallow window light will find.

Where a repair has left a smooth island in a textured field, we match the texture. Around here that means light orange peel on the post-war stock, knockdown in some of the mid-century remodels, and on the older plaster a hand floated finish with a genuine sand or swirl pattern that has to be worked with a trowel rather than sprayed. Getting the match wrong is more visible than the stain you were covering.

Cutting In, and Why the Line Matters

The paint line where a ceiling meets a wall is the one detail people notice without knowing they are noticing it. On a plaster ceiling with no crown, that junction is rarely straight, so a taped line will wander with the plaster and look wrong. We cut it freehand with a good brush, and where the wall is being painted too, we cut the ceiling color slightly down onto the wall and let the wall color cut back up to a straight line. It takes longer and it is the only way to get a clean edge on a wavy junction.

Crown molding changes the job again. If crown is present it is caulked at the top edge before anything is painted, because a shadow gap at that joint reads as a black line from the doorway.

Two Coats, and When One Is Honest

Over a sealed stain or a color change, two finish coats. There is no version of this where one coat is enough, and a quote built on one coat is a quote that comes back. On a ceiling that is genuinely sound, recently painted and only being freshened, one full coat can be the right answer and we will say so rather than selling you a second. Coverage on a ceiling is also worse than people expect. Rolling overhead you naturally spread the paint thinner than you would on a wall, so we work in bands, keep a wet edge and lay everything off in the same direction toward the main light source.

Dry time on a Pasadena afternoon is fast, and that is a problem more than a help. A warm dry room skins the paint over before you can join the next band to it, which is how lap marks appear in a room that was painted competently. We work smaller sections in summer and start on the shaded side of the house.

Call (626) 263-0391 and tell us the ceiling material and roughly the age of the house, and we can tell you before we arrive whether we are talking about a straightforward repaint or a plaster job.