# Paint ceiling same color as walls???



## rencole

WE are in the process of painting my daughter's bedroom (she is 13 years old, btw), and we are torn about the color to paint her ceiling.

I should back up a few months, in December of this year, her dad closed off an extra room (previously an open loft) and made the wall he closed off an open closet with shelving for here clothes and things.  When we began, the 3 walls were sponged with a light blue color with a wood stained chair rail and hunter green, taupe, light blue, and light pink striped wall paper below the chair rail.... yuck... it was there when we moved into the house, and I just haven't bothered to change it. 

We removed the chair rail, and stripped the wallpaper off. She originally wanted to paint the lower half a deep dark purple and the top half white with a black chair rail and black trim around the windows and the floor.   I didn't want to actually tell her how to decorate her room, so I found some dark purple paint on the oops rack at WM and got it for only $5, and we started painting, being an intelligent girl, she soon realized that it didn't look like what she had pictured.  So, we made a trip to HD and she chose her favorite color mint green (this has been her favorite color for years, and was why I was so shocked at the dark purple).

We are now almost finished with the paint, we put two coats of tinted primer on the walls last night, and just finished two coats of paint.  

The ceilings are not entirely smooth, but they look like the ceilings were smoothed out with a trowel (?) and they just have curved lines occassionally.   Hard to describe, but I think they will look nice with color.  I know I have seen rooms with the ceiling painted the same color as the walls and thought it looked good.  

I guess what I am trying to find out is whether or not this is actually a good idea or not? It seems like the rooms I saw like that were maybe bathrooms.  So, does anyone have any opinions about this?   Any help would be appreciated.  

Also, we are going to paint the chair rail white and rehang it, the closet shelves, the door, the door trim, and the window trim will all be white.

The only furniture in the room right now is her bed which is black, and she wants to get another black piece of furniture to go with it....


:help:


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## Nestor_Kelebay

1. There is no good reason NOT to paint the ceiling in a room the same colour as the walls.  Typically new homes will have the ceilings painted flat white, but the reason for this has nothing to do with painting.  It's because white paint reflects more light than any other colour, so that you benefit more from the natural light coming in through windows more if you reflect it around the room by bouncing it off the ceiling.  Basically, having white walls and ceilings would mean you'd turn your artificial lighting on a little later every evening because you'd have more natural light bouncing around the room to see by.

The reason for painting ceilings flat white (or texturing them) has even less to do with painting.  Ceilings are often illuminated by ceiling mounted light fixtures or by windows that come within a few inches of the ceiling.  Illuminating the ceiling at a sharp angle will exagerate any defects in the workmanship of the plastering or drywalling of the ceiling.

(Aside: Our eyes don't actually "see" certain things.  For example, you don't actually "see" a wave on otherwise calm water.  What you "see" is the way the wave perterbs the reflection of light off the otherwise smooth and flat surface of the water, and our brains understand that the perturbation of the reflected light is caused by a wave.)

If you paint ceilings with a high gloss paint, then you will have a smooth reflecting surface that will make any perturbation of the light reflected off the ceiling easy to "see".  By using a flat paint (or better yet, a texture), then you scatter the light reflected off the ceiling in every different direction (just as a glitch in the ceiling drywall or plaster would), and that helps camoflage any glitches in the ceiling drywall or plaster workmanship.  So, new houses come with flat painted or textured ceilings to minimize the number of homeowner complaints the builder has to deal with.

You can just about nail a dead animal to a ceiling, and texture over it with a thick enough texture not to leave a noticable "bump".  But, that textured ceiling is gonna be harder to clean, harder to paint and harder to repair (cuz of the requirement to match the texture).  If it wuz up to me, I would ban the texturing of walls and ceilings cuz most of the time it's done to hide possible poor workmanship of plasterers or drywallers, but it just makes looking after those walls and ceilings a hassle for the homeowners.


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## Nestor_Kelebay

2. I would paint the top surfaces of all of the shelves with an oil based paint.  I recommend Benjamin Moore "Melamine" in the 303-90 tint base.  This is a urethane fortified paint, which means that the binder is a mixture of alkyd and polyurethane resins that will dry to a harder film than an ordinary alkyd paint will.  You need a hard film to provide good service on all working surfaces, like shelves, mantles, floors, window sills, etc.  If you just paint a kitchen shelf, say, with a soft coating like a latex paint, then dust that settles on that paint will be ground into it when you slide something heavy and hard over that paint (like a stack of porcelain dishes or a large stainless steel pot).  The result will be that the soft coating will soon become embedded with dirt, making the surface look dirty.  The harder the coating, the less easily it will be damaged and the longer it will stay looking new.

I'd probably paint the doors and door frames with the BM 303-90 too.  Doors and door frames get all marked up by finger prints and dirty hands on people who turn light switches on and off with a "tennis" swing.

3. If you end up painting any furniture black to match your daughter's bed, DON'T use a black latex paint.  Latex paints are soft and they will rub off on your mint green walls leaving black marks on them.  Use the Benjamin Moore Melamine in the 303 "Black" tint base.  This will give you a hard black paint that won't rub off on a softer latex wall paint.


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## Housework44

Large bedroom, very high ceilings, very low light. Should I paint with a light color and the ceiling the same or a shade lighter or darker


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## nealtw

Welcome to the site, in future it is always better to start a new thread from the forum page. 
I think it's a matter of personal taste for the ceiling, if you go the same colour you don't have a problem cutting in a different colour.


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