Spent 3 hours painting a bathroom ceiling before realizing I used the wrong primer

I was in my upstairs bathroom last Saturday, rolling on what I thought was stain blocking primer over some water stains, and after the third coat I checked the bucket and saw it was just flat ceiling paint with zero primer in it, so I had to sand everything down and start over the next day with the right stuff has anyone else made a similar paint disaster and how did you fix it?

2 comments

2 Comments

felix1471mo ago

That ceiling paint is basically just watery chalk before you put it on, so sanding it down honestly was probably more work than it was worth. A lot of people will tell you to just throw another coat of the right primer on top and call it a day, especially if the stains aren't bad enough to bleed through. Unless you had like dark brown water stains showing through three coats, you probably didn't need to sand at all. The real mistake was not checking the bucket label first, but that's a lesson everyone learns once. If the stains were really that bad, they would have kept coming back anyway regardless of what paint you used first. Honestly, just paint over it with the right primer next time and save yourself the elbow grease.

perez.willow1mo ago

Three gallons of regular ceiling paint on a stain that needed an oil-based primer, that's the real issue nobody's talking about. The sanding just made it worse because now you've got dust stuck in the texture that'll show through anything you put on top. What you actually needed was a shellac-based primer like Zinsser BIN, that stuff seals water stains in one coat and dries in like 20 minutes. Without that base layer, the stain was always going to bleed through no matter how many coats of regular paint you threw at it. At this point you're better off cutting out that section of drywall and patching it new, honestly.