Skim coated a bedroom ceiling in Portland and it bubbled up bad on me

I was working on a 12x14 bedroom in a house off Hawthorne last Tuesday. Got the first coat down smooth on the old ceiling, then about 20 minutes later big bubbles started popping up all over. Turns out I forgot to prime the old paint before skimming. That oil based paint just rejected the mud. Had to scrape it all off while it was still wet, took me an extra 3 hours. I ended up using a shellac based primer and redoing it the next day and it stuck perfect. Anyone else run into this with older painted ceilings?

2 comments

2 Comments

felixw685d ago

Same thing happened to me on an old house in Southeast. Oil paint is sneaky, it'll look fine until the moisture hits it and then it's game over. I learned the hard way too, ended up using a primer called Kilz Original and it worked like a charm. Scraping wet mud is the worst, sorry you had to deal with that.

rowanw315d ago

Man that Kilz stuff is no joke, I had a buddy who used it on a bathroom ceiling that was basically peeling every six months and it held up for years. You're right about oil paint being sneaky though, its like it knows when you've given up on fixing it and just wants to watch you suffer. Speaking of old houses, my cousin had a place down in Mobile and the previous owner had painted over wallpaper with latex, just wild stuff. Every time it rained you could hear the wallpaper bubbling up from the other room like some kind of horror movie. At least with the peeling paint you can scrape it off, that wallpaper stuff was a nightmare to deal with.