Painting a ceiling is harder than it looks - by Mosman's The Tidy Painter

Painting a ceiling is harder than it looks. For starters, everything in the whole room underneath has to be covered or moved. Small nick-nacks and paintings need to be moved to another room. Fabric groundsheets are good for covering floors and disposible plastic sheets can be wrapped around large bits of furniture that are too hard to move.

Then there’s the choice of paint. I used to used Dulux Ceiling White for most ceilings. Its good for going over a ceiling that is fairly white already, but its quite thin/watery. So, if you have a stained ceiling or one that has had a lot of plaster repairs, a more opaque paint is needed. For this I’d  use Taubmans Tradex Flat White.

http://www.taubmans.com.au/paints/tradex

It is quite good at covering most ceilings.

But when my friend Bahaa, who runs a local coffee shop, asked me to paint his ceiling I knew I needed the big guns. Imagine 20 years of commercial kitchen grease and gunk, lifted skywards and deposited on a white ceiling.
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I used the usual suspects but they didn’t cover very well at all. So then I tried my standard undercoat/blockout paint – Taubmans 3 in 1. It worked a treat – blocking out the mess and leaving a nice solid semi-flat white finish.

http://www.taubmans.com.au/paints/taubmans-3-in-1

So I guess it goes to show that sometimes the ‘standard’ solutions are not always the best and that a little creativity in thought can give great results.
 
By Tony Richardson - The Tidy Painter - Mosman, Cremorne and the Lower North Shore's favourite painter.