Paint Extra High Vaulted Ceilings, step by step

“Oh what a feeeeeeling, painting on the ceeeeeiling.” Why yes that was a Lionel Richie reference. You are welcome.

It was time to get some paint up in this heezy. And by heezy, I mean sunroom… hence the furniture being all piled in the center.

But before we get to painting, let us talk about the half-brick wall in this room – since you folks offered up plenty of thoughts and suggestions in the last sunroom post. Some had suggested covering the drywalled portion in brick veneer or reclaimed wood.

Unfortunately the dry wall sits in front of the brick, so there’d be this weird lip between the real brick and the veneer/wood (so we’d prefer not to add anything up top to make it stick out further like an awkward above-the-window overbite). We are in fact leaning towards either trying to distress/fade the brick or straight up painting it (like the same brick that was already painted by the previous owners in our living room, especially since it already has some splatters on it from the previous paint job).

See how the last owners of this house had already painted the wall of brick in the living room (on the other side of the sunroom doors)? Since they are both in the same sight line, we think painting that small u-shaped expanse of it in the sunroom may be the most cohesive solution – so the sunroom feels more connected to the rest of the house.

But before doing anything rash, we hoped to give the brick the benefit of the doubt – so we chose not to take any action on it yet. First we hoped to paint the rest of the old yellowy-cream colored walls in the room to see if that influenced our decision about the brick at all.

So we readied the rest of the room by moving out nearly everything, which turned our living room into a temporary disaster zone. This shot below is for all of you who enjoy the chaos of Hands-on. Oh yeah, it spreads to at least a few other rooms when you are painting one…

Burger did not seem the mind the temporary influx of extra pillows to curl up on. This is his “excuse me dude with the camera, someone’s trying to nap here” face.

And thankfully Clara was on a play-date with my parents, so we could dive in and do as much as we could without worrying about her getting into paint or tripping over the massive pile o’ chaos on the living room while we painted.

But back to the sunroom. Painting is one of those projects we can practically do in our sleep by now… except for when it involves 12 foot ceilings. That was a new challenge for us. But we could not live with those white ceilings and those yellowed old cream walls anymore (yes, they were two distinct colors) so we dove right in.

How? We simply busted out our ladder and go to work.

Oh yeah, forgot to tell you the paint color. We went with our current go-to: Rockport Gray by Benjamin Moore (which is also in our bedroom, and is in fact more of a warm brownish-gray than a cold cement gray). I will explain why we made that choice when we get to the after pictures, so simply hang on for the time being. I realize it is not much to look at when all you see so far is the edged corners…

Edging in fact took a long time – even with us both doing it – since this room is in short all corners and windows. And if I do say so myself, I am not half bad at it. Yep, there may be a new edging sheriff in town. Take that Deputy $herdog. Ok, I take that back. Sherry can fairly much lap me when it comes to edging. So she did all of the edging around all of the doors and windows except for the few windows up near the ceiling, which I tackled on the ladder.

Once all of the edging was done, Sherry did a second coat around all the doors and windows while I took to the pole. Wait, that sounded bad. I have in fact never painted with a roller that is attached to a pole before. Even when doing other ceilings (8ft ones, that is) I typically simply stand on a stool. And I gotta say I was impressed with how relatively straightforward it was. Granted it did get tiring to hold your arms and neck up like that for so long, but it was not terrible.

But the rod extending pole could not assist us get the area where the fan attached to the ceiling (where we needed to be more exact than a roller ever could be). And my ladder could not get me high sufficient to edge that area by hand either. So that is when Sherry and I whipped up this contraption. Yup, it is a brush taped to a pole. We are true professionals around here.

If you were not convinced of my edging prowess before, simply check out this magic going on. That is what we call painting with surgical precision. Although I realized I should’ve taken a detailed after shot of how excellent this in fact turned out. Seriously, it worked like a charm, folks.

It took us two coats and a total of about seven hours across two days, so it certainly was not our fastest paint job in the world – but we are truly glad with the results.

Trust us: despite the warm gray color, this room is far from gloomy. Light floods in (which is one of the reasons we knew we would not regret going with a darker tone in there) and even the tiled floors feel less yellow now that the walls are not the same creamy-bisque tone. Although we are the first to admit that the room still has a looong way to go until it is a functional, wrapped up room (remember how the middle makes no sense?).

And if you are wondering about the two blue stools having a hushed conversation in the corner together (stool meeting is now in session!), we are simply experimenting with some layout ideas. The stools are helping us picture perhaps tucking a small cafe table in that corner, but we are not married to anything yet. We will keep you posted!

Oh, and I promised I’d explain the rationale behind Rockport Gray a bit more so here we go:

• It truly makes all the white trim in the room stand out, so it feels crisp in a way that the old yellowed cream walls did not (this paint choice did the same trim-crisping thing in our bedroom, which we enjoyed about the color)
• The room has a fairly crazy ceiling (it slopes away from the house and up, like a rocket ship) so we thought a moodier and darker color might downplay the strange angles and make it all blend together more than it did with the previous white ceiling and creamy-yellow walls
• As we mentioned a few photos up, the tile floor feels a lot less monochromatic and yellowed since the walls are no longer the same exact tone (it felt like a beige box with an oddly shaped white top before)
• We also thought it’d tie in well with the living room’s Moonshine walls as well as the grellow walls of the kitchen (both of which you see from the sunroom – so whatever we chose had to go with both)
• In the spring, summer, and fall (aka, any other season than the bleak and bare one that we are right now in) we want the greenery outside to be the star, so we thought picking a moody not-crazy-or-compete-y color would keep from overshadowing it
• The brownish-gray helps us camouflage that similarly colored heating/cooling unit a bit

We also thought the new wall color picked up the tone of the mortar too, simply in case we chose to keep the brick as is.

And now that the room is painted, here is where we stand on the brick: we are not sold on leaving it as-is. It still feels truly awkward to us since the top end of the drywall above it rests oddly on the window (like it is squishing it or something). And since there is already a whole wall of painted brick to the right of the slider (in the living room) it still feels awkwardly disjointed from the rest of the house in a way that a painted brick wall would not.

We did think about trying to gray-wash it a little first (with watered down paint, stain, or even by rubbing some cement on it) simply to see if that helps to tone down the red – as demonstrated by my poor Photoshop attempt below…

…but that still feels like not-as-seamless-of-a-solution-as-painting-it like the brick in the adjoined living room. So that might be where we end up.

As consistently, we promise to keep you posted! Oh and speaking of future planning in here, we are putting more thought into the window-seat-under-the-window-wall idea, so that should be exciting if we decide to go for it. You know we will share all the details as we creep along.

Oh and as much work as we still have to do in this room, I must say that this has certainly reconfirmed for me (once again) that painting a room is an excellent way to make it feel like it is yours. Our sunroom suddenly does not feel like a forgotten project-room stuck on the side of our house, it is in fact starting to feel like a place we can hang out on a lazy Sunday – which is exactly how we used the sunroom in our first house, so it has us all sorts of excited about the possibilities. What did you folks do this weekend? Was there any painting or planning? Any other pole-related projects going on?