Have you tried to paint ceilings in your recently purchased, older home, only to find they are peeling almost as fast as your are rolling the paint on?

This is a common problem. It occurs because of a product called calcimine, which was used in the first half of the last century to coat ceilings and walls. Calcimine is a coating that is made by mixing calcium carbonate, water, and glue to make a substance that is fast drying, opaque, and easy to use.

There are many solutions tossed around for this issue but really only three effective ones.

Tear down

Take down the board or plaster, and replace, thus avoiding having to deal with this anymore. This could be quite costly and unnecessary, depending on the condition of the wall.

Complete removal of calcimine coating

This is a good middle ground between spot repair and total replacement, as you are scraping all of the calcimine off, which, if it is already peeling, should not be as hard as it sounds.

For this you will need plenty of plastic for the floor, items in the room, and doorways into the room. Next you will need a good calcimine sealer. This is really important because, although you have removed the coat from the surface, there is still plenty of residue that the sealer will penetrate to ensure proper adhesion of patch and paint coats.

Once you have primed the area and it is completely dry, you will want to fill any imperfections with a normal, lightweight joint compound, followed by a sanding of these spots.

Now you can paint. Many people insist on priming but I believe that a good high hide ceiling paint applied in multiple coats looks good and lasts as long as if you had primed then painted.

Spot repair
This is the same system as described above, but applied to smaller areas or as needed.

You are now free to step back from the ledge, as your ceiling will no longer be inexplicably peeling, and you can move onto the next project.

Thanks for stopping by and check back later for more useful tips from Any Season Painting.