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how to paint old cedar boards

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05-05-12, 01:18 PM

minerva

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how to paint old cedar boards

I have very old, dirty dark cedar boards on ceiling and walls in part of my house. I want to lighten them by painting or staining or whitewashing. Any suggestions of how-to's, products, caveats, etc.?

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05-05-12, 04:17 PM

marksr

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Start off by cleaning them the best you can. Have they ever had any type of finish on them?
Painting is pretty straight forward - primer followed by 2 coats of paint. I'd use an oil base enamel undercoater and then satin enamel for the finish.......... but IMO if you can get them cleaned up decent, a few coats of polyurethane would look best. Any type of sheen that is on the wood will help to reflect light better helping it to not look so dark.

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05-07-12, 06:38 AM

stickshift

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I'd even consider a light sanding as well in addition to what Mark suggested.

Polyurethane would be my choice of finish as well, I'm not a huge fan of painting wood.

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Painting & Staining. All Interior and Exterior Surfaces
Sticky Paint

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jlcalbre on Feb 11, 2008

I use a semi-gloss latex paint on my interior trim and doors. For some reason the paint is sticky, even after several years. I have painted a few shelves with it and if I leave anything on them for any period of time, they seem to stick to the paint a little when I try to move them. Several of the doors make noise when I try to close them as if pulling tape off a roll. Not a big deal until you try to close the door of a 2 year old who is sleeping! Any ideas why this is happening and how to prevent/cure it? ThanksRead More
Painting & Staining. All Interior and Exterior Surfaces
tales of woe suffering and the tribulations of smooth walls

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drcristoff on May 07, 2012

[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Times]New to this forum and let me begin by saying that I have infinite respect for all the professionals out there that make this stuff appear easy when it is in fact quite quite difficult. So I embarked on the most perilous journey of removing wallpaper from about 700 sq feet of my home with the intention of painting it. I was thinking originally, ok this might take a a few weeks working evenings and weekends and it will take work but won't be that difficult, right? Wrong. I write my chronicles and ask for guidance from anyone who has a solution easier than starting over again. stage 1. Begin by scraping and removing all old wallpaper. Comes down not too horribly difficult, but numerous gouges and rough spots to repair. Did make good effort to scrub down walls after removal to get as much paste off as possible. I feel this step went as well as possible, doubt it has any bearing on my later problem. stage 2. Had the bright idea to skimcoat all the walls with joint compound to get rid of the gouges and such and to even out some of the warping in the walls. *I should note that although my home is over 100 it does have actual sheetrock which a previous owner installed on top of the original plaster, so at least I am dealing with drywall and not plaster. The skim coat eventually, after many many mistakes and sanding skimming sanding skimming, cursing, skimming, sanding, eventually came out fairly smooth. People who can do this quickly are like another form of human, more evolved than myself. I feel this step eventually ended up fairly good even though it took forever to get done. stage 3. priming. Here I feel like my big mistakes begin. I first selected a product called gardz from zinsser, it is billed as a water based sealer for new drywall. I rolled it on and it seemed ok as I was working, as it dried however I noticed that as it dries it shrinks. Since it has penetrated the joint compound this shrinking also shrinks the joint compound, which resulted in weird hills and valleys throughout. Ok, so with the project clocking in at around 5 weeks already I hired a guy to reskim the really bad areas, so we are back to relatively smooth finish. Now what to do, I've got to seal the joint compound because it will soak up paint like nobody's business. I decide to go with an oil based primer from kilz because that seems to be the standard for sealing new drywall. I apply it and notice a small amount of roller stipple as I go, I come to terms with it and feel a little bit of stipple wont be bad (after feeling like destroying the entire house because I really wanted a smooth finish, but we can't always get what we want). This may be where the problem lies, I am not sure if I should have thinned the primer, it was going on kind of thick and I've never worked with an oil based product before. I finish the priming completely and have what *appears* to be an even stipple throughout. stage 3. Painting. Ok so I finally get to the point where we are top coating with latex paint (I chose ben moore's Aura line in eggshell). We rolled it on with foam rollers to get the smoothest finish we could, 2 coats throughout. Looks pretty good, its nighttime got the job finished, pretty happy. I wake up the next day and look down the hallway and what do I see, the worst possible sheen problems. Looking pretty much like a crazy patchwork of roller marks everywhere. So here we have it, after all the hard work I seem to have really awful sheen issues, these are not visible head on, but at an angle it is really very visible. I feel pretty frustrated because I think I used the best practices (good quality paint, used a primer first) but it still ended up looking awful. 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