What Should You Paint First? DIY Painting Ceiling, Walls, Or Trim?

I get quite a few comments and questions about whether we paint walls, ceilings, or trim first. And in this video, we're going to go about addressing some of those issues and trying to answer those questions for you. And there's a lot of different scenarios that determine whether we paint the ceilings, walls, or trim first and whether we spray or roll them. And we're in a house right now that was a house that's a fire restoration house. that had a had a fire in the pantry and the customers have actually moved out and they're in a hotel. So, there's no customers living in this home. And that's the first thing that we do and then determine whether we're going to spray inside of a house and what we're going to do first. If the customers live in the home, we try to minimize the spraying that we're going to do inside of a house because of the silica dust created by the sprayers. And if we're ever dealing with trim inside of a home and we're going to actually paint the trim and the woodwork and it's painted any doors, we always spray the trim on an interior of a home. We only spray it because that way it's going to look more professional. It's not going to leave brush strokes or roping. And so here at BNK Painting, we never actually brush trim. We always spray it. So whether the customer lives in the the home or not, we always spray. In this case, the customer is not living in here. Everything's actually been moved out into storage facilities by a disaster maintenance company. And so, there's nothing inside the home that we need to worry about dust, too. If there's personal belongings inside the house, if there's beds, furniture, stuff like that, you always got to consider the silica dust created by the spraying of either your walls, ceilings, or trim. And you got to protect those items. And sometimes that can be more cumbersome than actually just rolling. But this is going to be a full interior repaint. Nobody's living in it and there's no belongings in the house. So, we're going to try to spray as much as we can to make the job go a lot faster. And in this job, there was multiple colors in the house and that's another determining factor whether you're going to roll or spray the walls. All the ceilings are a different color than the walls. So, we got to take that in consideration, too. So, in this scenario, nobody's living in the house. There's no furniture, no personal belongings. We have at least seven colors on the walls throughout the house. So, it's not going to be efficient or faster to actually spray the walls. So, we're going to roll the walls. The trim, we always spray the trim. We never roll the trim. And now, the ceilings are all a different color than all the walls in the house throughout. So, we're going to want to spray the ceilings. And we only use a flat on our ceilings because if the walls in ceilings are a different color and you actually spray like a satin on the walls, then you could get actually flashing on the walls. We use a product from Sher Williams called Eminence and it's flat and when you actually spray the the ceilings, it hides imperfections better, doesn't show flashing, and it doesn't show lap marks. So, in this house, we started off, we decided because of all the multiple walls, multiple color colors, it was going to be faster to roll the walls. So, we started off the process by actually spraying or spraying all of our ceilings first. And we sprayed our ceilings first, and this eminence creates a lot of downfall dust. And if you spray your trim first, then you're going to have to mask off all your trim because of all the downfall dust that would go onto your brand new spray sprayed trim. So, we went around the whole house, sprayed all the ceilings, our light color, and then we began masking to spray our trim. Then, we went around, sprayed all of our trim, and we're actually careful or we mask our ceilings. Throw some paper up top so no overspray will go up into our freshly ceilings. The ceiling and walls were fairly the same color, so uh you don't have a whole lot to worry about, but we also you can either mask or shield it. And when we were actually spraying this trim, we actually just held cardboard shields up with a shield holder and sprayed our trim without masking the ceilings. So now we sprayed our ceilings first, went back, sprayed our trim, and now we're going back and rolling all of our walls. And almost every single room in the house is a different color. So we're extremely fast doing cutins with a brush. And so we're rolling it. You could spray walls, but it's not. We're going to We could actually cut in the ceilings with a brush and roller way faster than we can do masking it and spraying the walls. So now another scenario would be if all the walls were the same color and the ceilings were the same color and the trim was one color. So if the people moved out of the house and you only got two colors, trim and walls and you're not concerned about the dust, silica dust and stuff cuz there's no personal belongings in the house. Then we actually spray everything. We're going to spray our trim first, mask off our trim, and then we're going to shoot our walls and ceilings, one sheen in one color. And the thing that we I don't necessarily like about doing that is now your ceilings become a satin cuz we always use a satin on our walls. So, you're going to be spraying a satin on the ceiling. And so, you can get flashing on your ceiling. And you got to be really good spraying your ceilings using a large tip. I like a 1221 tip when I'm actually spraying the ceilings. So I less likely to get flashing on the ceilings. So that's another scenario where you have just two color walls and ceilings. Now if the people live in the house and they got personal belongings in the house, then you got to take that in consideration. We never ever spray walls. If somebody lives in the home, we always just roll our walls. And in new construction, that's a completely different thing because there's no flooring in there. It's all wood. Our new construction process is we always spray our trim first. In a new construction, it's always one color. We spray trim first and then walls and ceilings are sprayed second. And those are some of the scenarios that we run into. And I'll discuss a few more scenarios here. So, now we have another scenario that we'll discuss with you. And if nobody lives in the house and say it's a rental, um you're spraying rentals quickly, trying to make money fast, we like to actually spray. If nobody lives in the house, uh the flooring's going to be replaced or there's no flooring in it, no carpet. This is a scenario we run into quite a bit. remodels, um, rentals, and where somebody's repainting and going to be moving in. Somebody moved out, somebody's going to be moving in, replacing carpets, and they want the ceilings a different color than the walls and the trim all one color. And in that case, there's nothing in the house. We don't need to worry about dust, silica dust, overspray. We're going to spray all of our trim. And then we're going to mask off our trim. And then we're going to spray all of our walls. And then we actually after the walls are dry, we'll mask our ceilings. We're going to run plastic. It's we call 9 by400 plastic. And we tack it about 6 in from the top of the ceiling. The plastic will drop to the floor. And then we'll run 9 in paper with 1 in tape around the ceiling. And that'll cover our ceiling and it'll stop any downfall from spraying the ceilings to drop it on their wall because you'll get dust that will fall down. So to explain that process again, if we're our ceilings are a different color than our walls and a different color than the trim and nobody lives in the house, we're going to spray it all. We're going to start by spraying our trim. We use a product of semi- gloss uh latex enamel. Spray all of our trim. Then we're going to mask off all of our trim. We're going to spray our walls. As soon as the walls are done, we pull off all the masking off the trim while it's still wet. And then we're going to mask the walls after the walls dry with 9x400 plastic. Drop it to the floor. And then cover the top, which will overlap the 9x400 plastic with your 9 in paper, 1 in tape. Then we're going to spray the ceilings. and it's before that dries, you're going to pull all the masking off right down to the floor and your job is complete. There's one more scenario we'll discuss and that's in the structure itself, the home, if we're not spraying any trim work or any woodwork and we're just doing walls and ceilings or just walls, we never actually break out a sprayer because we don't want to create any dust and we don't want to create liability for our company. So, we're going to roll we're going to roll everything. And so if um the the trim's not is not being painted, what we like to do is we actually roll our ceilings first. We always roll our ceilings first. You'll roll your ceilings and bring it down onto your wall about just about a half inch. And the product we use from Sher Williams is a flat paint called Eminence. That stuff dries extremely fast and within about two hours you can go begin doing your walls and cutting in your ceilings. And we always do the ceilings first and drop it down onto the wall because that way now you're cutting in looking up. If you do your walls first and then your ceilings, now you've actually got to do your cutins looking up at the ceiling in working this way. And it's a lot harder to do your cutins. A lot harder to get a straight line if you do your ceilings last if you're rolling your walls and your ceilings. Now, if the ceilings and walls are all one color, then we just run one inch tape around everything, put our drop boss down, and roll it all. But if we're ceilings are different color than our walls, we always do our ceilings first, bring it down, and then do our walls. Our cutins are much faster and much easier. This is Chris, the Idaho Painter, going over our painting process. What we like to do first, walls, ceilings, or trim. This is Chris, the Idaho Painter. For more painting tips, you can find us on Facebook at the Idaho Painter or you could also find us at Tamarackpainters. And when you're done watching our videos, don't forget to like us, share us, and subscribe to our channel.