RESOLVE Ceiling Painting Problems!

this is paint live TV I'm Christy Idaho painter and I'm journeyman Jon and today we're gonna talk about how to get good results painting your ceilings so and this is one of the trickiest parts of working on an interior is figuring out how to make your ceilings look good without having lap marks yes we get the questions all the time across our social media and our academies how to paint my ceiling so I don't get lap marks cuz we all get them at some point in time and it can be very very frustrating and so we do have some really cool tips and tricks and one of them is lighting and we're going to talk about lighting how that affects you know your ceiling and how the lap marks will show up more or less according to the lighting and then we just talk about some of the tools that will give you better results too so you have two options typically you can either roll your ceilings or spray your ceilings and if you're gonna roll them it's probably best to use a bigger roller isn't it then a smaller roller yes if you can eliminate the number of laps that you have to make then therefore you eliminate the potential for lap marks imagine that absolutely it's same goes with spraying them if you're spraying your ceilings I like spraying the ceilings whenever I can we'll say like a twelve twenty one tip because that's gonna give you a really wide fan and the weight of the fan hunt the less lap marks so if you try to spray your ceilings would say a 310 what's gonna happen John well you're gonna be there for a very long time and you should consider other options since it's a nice way of putting it right try stepping up into like a 517 or something like that 619 so or 19 is probably the smallest I'd recommend yeah yeah and so the orifice size cuz it's gonna have a lot to do with it your ceilings one of the things about ceilings as they are high and so what it is hot up there typically a lot hotter than it is down here where we are right now the attics heat up the ceilings more so the paint is going to dry a lot faster so the more paint you could put on the faster or the slower it's gonna dry and the better the results you're gonna have so even if you do everything right if you have a wide wide roller you're applying it you know fast you're applying it thick and heavy you're overlapping and you're keeping it wet ed you still could end up with results that could be very frustrating and that's because alighting right John it's all about lighting when it comes to ceilings and so one of the rules that you want to keep kind of a rule of thumb is that you're going to roll against the lighting that is coming into the room so the room we're standing in here we have windows to the north and we have windows to the south now because we're in the Northern Hemisphere all most of our light is going to come in through that south window it's a really good idea to go against that light so if the lights coming in from Crystal Chris is the light imagine Chris is the light whoa right you want to go this way against that light because if you go down towards the light you're going to pick up all the edges of those lap marks and lap marks really are just high points in the paint that you've left on I'm usually because there's not enough paint on there or it's drying too fast and it doesn't have an opportunity to gel out so what would happen if you're in a room that had no windows well you you just don't you shouldn't be there why are you painting them don't even bay Nick as deputy conceded I even bought and there's probably no doors either in which case we have a conundrum but really what so if that's the case so lighting is our first priority wherever those windows are coming in we're gonna prioritize a south-facing window if the windows around the east or the west same thing you still want to go against the light now if you're in a room with no windows generally what we're teaching our guys is that you want to prioritize going against wherever the entrance to the room is so if you have the entrance say behind here someone's going to walk into that room again we want to go side to side and not towards where that door is again we're just giving ourselves the best odds for if things do dry a little too fast that you're not going to see any of those lap marks so what would happen if you had a scenario where you had windows in a room so I we have that scenario here in this house I believe but what would happen so again your priority is going to be the southern facing window because that's where most of the light is going to be coming in and then the second choice you're going to make after that is going to be where is the entrance to the room so one of the decisions is if you've got multiple windows you're really trying to determine where the Sun is gonna shine in through what window the most ideally yes so if you've got a really like if the house has a lot of shade on one side that window really becomes a non-factor and you don't have to think about that the reverse is going to be true so if you're in the southern hemisphere you're going to want to watch out for those northern windows instead because that's where a lot of that lights going to be coming in so sometimes your house is going to be situated not true north and so you're gonna have to play with a lot of those variables and think about where is most of the light coming in and we want to go against that yeah I know you know I there's a situation one time in my career we were spraying ceilings and and I sprayed the ceiling it had a light source coming in out of one window and the only one window and I did with my eye all the rules according to lighting sprayed the ceiling and I sprayed it four times and I sprayed it one time didn't look good spray and then I can started changing directions trying to figure out and it was just really it came down to just spraying so it wasn't necessarily lighting it was just because it was being sprayed and the lap marks were just showing and then when we turned around and rolled it after we decided we're not gonna spray it for a fifth time it looked good and so you know sometimes just spraying isn't the the way that's gonna work I think sometimes you're just gonna have to determine what's gonna work best I mean first you're gonna start off with you know your lighting and then some of its convenience and speed also how fast you need to get the ceiling done yeah so I'm you can spray it faster than you can roll it yeah you can and really when it comes down to it lap marks are just shadows that are being cast across that ceiling and so you've got to figure out if you've got lap marks what's causing those little shadows do you have fingering on the tips of your gun you don't have enough pressure or your pumps not big enough or are you leaving a bunch of lap marks because you haven't laid out your your roller marks gently enough I'm you're you're pushing too hard and it's leaving creases on the ends of your roller so that's what you're trying to avoid and and you know using a flat paint too is going to save you a ton of heartache yeah that's ceiling that we sprayed four times that was a satin paint and now spraying ceilings with anything other than a flat can be very very frustrating and eventually when once we transition to flat paints we had a lot more success spraying flats and we did satin so we used to spray the ceilings and satins but like you touched on the the the fingering on or detailing some people call it on your tips if you're not just right if you get just a slight bit of fingering even if you're overlapping it's extremely heavy and you're saturating the ceiling those fingers will probably show up and in a certain lighting so I know that the titan hea tips give a really good feather on the edges so if you want to have really good success sprain you probably use a titan hea tip yeah that's definitely going to save you a lot plus you can operate them at a lower pressure which means you don't have to have quite as big of a pump that's pushing all of that product out because that's that's where i think a lot of people get into trouble is they're trying to use a really small pump to put more to put not enough paint on and then you end up getting those flashing issues and one thing with ceilings it is a horizontal surface so you can put a whole lot more paint on that service then you can your walls without it running so don't be afraid to load it up because that ceiling is gonna be no matter you know what time of year is typically gonna be significantly warmer than your walls it's definitely hot so especially in the summertime extremely high so there you have it i think gave them some tips didn't we john i think there's some things and there's some treasures you can trove and dig through and search through find out maybe you won't have better success painting ceilings hopefully you have if you have give us a thumbs up yeah yeah I don't know what else you leave us your experiences down in the comments below let us know if you have other tips or tricks that you've used in order to resolve some of these issues because we don't have all the answers all the time well then you know of so leave them below hope you've enjoyed this video if you have please consider once again giving us a thumbs up we would appreciate it very much we love you stare dreamily into the camera [Laughter] [Music]