How to Paint Calcimine Ceilings

I partnered with my friends at Benjamin Moore for this post.

As you know from my guest room inspiration post, we’ve started work on this room.  BUT I didn’t tell you everything…

First, let me show you these very cute and adorable photos of Conor. We decided we were going to start work on the guest room and were all very excited!  Luke and I moved furniture into the office area and started prepping the room.

Luke was going to paint the ceiling with Conor’s help, but first they needed to scrape the loose bits:

Can you see the excitement and the pure joy of DIY on Conor’s face?

You can, can’t you?!?  That exhilarating feeling of knowing just a bit of hard work, a bit of scraping, a bit of painting is going to make a room look so much better.

Once the scraping was done, Conor got into his painting clothes!  All white, just like painters:

He did such a great job and was so excited to be helping.  They painted the entire ceiling.

I came up to snap a few more photos and see how it was going, Luke said he wasn’t sure if I wanted to come in.

The paint was peeling off the ceiling and falling to the floor in sheets,

just like our hopes and dreams for this room.  As you can imaging we were feeling quite deflated and poor little Conor worked so hard too.  I thought we’d get the ceiling done on the Saturday and start staining the wood work the next day.  That is what I thought, but I was wrong.

Our home was built in 1927 and has calcimine ceilings.  We thought the ceiling in this room had been done over but it turns out they were calcimine.

In old homes, the plaster they used would take up to three weeks to cure but you could calcimine them after a day and the paint would stay white for a very long time.  So they are great unless you want to paint them (with water based paint, as we did).

What should we do?!?

I talked to my friends at Hingham Lumber, our friend, and professional painter, Andy Lane and also had a chat with my friends at Benjamin Moore.

We had a few options:

1. We could scrape the ceiling down and paint with a special calcimine paint, but once you use this you always have to use this and it can be very messy to work with.

2. We could take the picture rail down and put up 1/4 inch ply and plaster the ceiling.  Then paint with the Benjamin Moore Waterbourne Ceiling Paint. This is a good option if your ceiling is in bad shape and you can afford a plasterer or you know how to do it yourself.

3. Completely wash the calcimine off and then paint.

or

4. We could scrape the paint off the ceiling and paint with a Benjamin Moore’s Oil Based Primer and then paint with the Waterbased Ceiling Paint.

We went with option number 4!

Luke scraped all the paint off the ceiling (with Conor’s help) and this took quite a while.

You should have seen his hair after.  It was all white with huge flakes in it.

The ceiling looked like this when he was finished:

Then it was time for this product – Fresh Start Oil Based Primer by Benjamin Moore:

This was an excellent primer.  It provided us with excellent adhesion, minimal order and acted as a barrier for the waterbased paint we were going to put up.

After with just the primer on the ceiling-

Gleaming with no flaking paint (phew)!

Then he painted on the white ceiling paint (Waterbourne Ceiling Paint by Benjamin Moore) (and we were nervous that the primer wouldn’t seal the water out):

I’m happy to report the ceiling is painted!

There is no flaking and it looks gorgeous!

Luke has informed me that I’m doing the rest of this room by myself.  So far I’ve darkened the trim (and I’ll share another tutorial on how I did this).

I’m painting the walls with Benjamin Moore’s Glass Slipper today and I’m so excited!

Disclosure: I received paint for this post from Benjamin Moore.  I love Benjamin Moore and highly recommend their paints.

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