Nicotine Stains on ceiling

calleyw

I have just moved in to a house where the previous owner was a smoker.

The kitchen is the worse. And the ceiling is really grim.

Any way we want to decorate. Would just washing down with sugar soap and then just painting over in white be ok?

Will there be a problem with leach through if we don't seal it first. Or is two or three coats of normal bog standard white paint be ok.

Many thanks in advance.

Yours

Calley

plumb1_2

I would use this type of product first
http://www.screwfix.com/app/sfd/cat/pro.jsp?id=15679&ts=72826

crankup

If you paint over the nicotine stains with a water-based paint like emulsion then a lot of the stain will come back through. So your nice brilliant white ceiling will look a dirty cream again.
Sugar soap is the best option. You may notice spot stains come through on the 1st coat of emulsion. You could seal these with a runny bit of white undercoat. On some smoky artexed ceilings it can be hard cleaning it well enough and potentially damage the stipple. In these instances I often thin some white undercoat and give the whole ceiling a very thin coat. This will seal it back nicely.

Hope this helps

squeaky

calleyw wrote:

Will there be a problem with leach through if we don't seal it first. Or is two or three coats of normal bog standard white paint be ok.

I recently did mine after they'd been smoked at for ten years. I just slapped the old white stuff on and didn't have any bleed through. Though the other thing I've done there is to paint the last of three coats as a colour. A _light_ colour, obviously, but I always reckon that faults in colours always show up less noticeably than faults in white.

Luis

I agree about the sugar soap, then emulsion.

A side note - im my esperience, Wilkinson's emulsion has the best coverage I have ever seen - you need a lot fewer coats.

Housenet

ex-decorator: I always used to use oil based paint when covering any kind of stain but this is impracticle on such a large area. :cool:

Queenie

Sugar Soap gets my vote too - economical solution