If you’re able to paint your ceiling before you move into a new property, this is always the favorite option because you won’t need to worry about getting spills and splatters on furniture or being restricted in terms of movement because of bulky items. However, most people who need to paint their ceilings will do so while they are living in the home, which brings us to the common question of how to paint the ceiling without moving furniture.
If you have the option of moving furniture into another room while you paint a ceiling, this is going to be preferable. You could move the smaller items, such as side tables or accent chairs, to a guest bedroom while the ceiling gets painted. For many people, moving furniture to another room while a ceiling gets painted isn’t possible due to a lack of space.
Even in properties with lots of rooms, it’s rare that there is enough free space available to move an entire room’s worth of furniture into. For this reason, it’s good to know that there are ways of painting a ceiling without having to move the furniture.
Do You Need to Move Furniture to Paint a Ceiling?
When painting the walls of a room, the furniture needs to be pushed away from the wall so that you can access it for painting. However, when painting a ceiling, there are usually no obstructions that block you from reaching the ceiling, so do you need to move the furniture out of the way?
A roller is used to paint ceilings, and it’s common for rollers to spit paint out, which can drop onto your furniture and onto your floors. For this reason, it is advisable to either move furniture out of the way or to protect the furniture so that it doesn’t get splattered with paint.
If you have a lot of furniture, then you may need to alter the layout so that you can work around it to access the ceiling. An extendable roller brush handle will be useful in this case because it will allow you to paint areas of the ceiling without standing directly underneath them.
Protecting Furniture from Ceiling Paint
Use a Drop Cloth
If you’re concerned that paint splatters are going to land on your furniture while a ceiling is being painted, then a drop cloth is a useful solution. These are expansive cloths used by decorators, which can be draped over furniture as a means of protecting it from paint spills.
The best way to utilize a drop cloth is to push all of your furniture into the middle of a room and then hand the drop cloth over it. This will allow you to access all the edges of the ceilings all the way around the room. When you need to paint the middle of the ceiling, you can push your collection of furniture to one side.
Use Furniture Sliders
Furniture sliders are round discs that come in various sizes, and they have padding underneath made from foam or felt. They are designed to be positioned underneath the feet of your furniture to make furniture easy to slide around. They can be put underneath sofa legs so you can slide your furniture to the other side of the room easily on carpet, or without causing any damage to wood or laminate flooring.
Furniture sliders make the task of rearranging furniture in a room much easier, especially if you are completing this job by yourself. With the use of furniture sliders, you can slide all of your furniture to one end of your room while you paint that side of the ceiling.
Then, slide all of the furniture back to the other end of the room while you paint the ceiling on the opposite side. Once the ceiling has been painted, use the furniture sliders to push your furniture back into its correct place. For added protection, it’s a good idea to use a drop cloth over your furniture even once you have slid it out of the way.
Use a Roller Guard
The reason that furniture needs protection when you paint a ceiling is the fact that the roller can splatter paint in directions you weren’t intending (downwards!). A roller guard is a simple yet effective design that has been created to prevent paint splatter when using a roller.
The roller guard works as a shield between the roller head and the user to catch any paint splatters before they land on the user or the furniture around them. This can make the task of painting a ceiling so much easier because you won’t need to move your furniture around.
Be sure to practice using a roller guard in an empty area before using it around furniture to check that no splatters of paint are escaping around the edges of the shield. If in any doubt, use drop cloths in conjunction with a roller shield to properly protect all of your furniture.
Go Slowly
If you are unable to move your furniture or protect it when painting a ceiling, the next best thing is to limit the amount of paint your roller spits out while it’s being used. To do this, ensure your roller only has a thin coat of paint on it, and roll it slowly but firmly across the surface of the ceiling.
Fast motions result in more splatter, so if you make your movements slow and purposeful, you can actually paint the ceiling without making any splatter at all. This is a tactic that is best only used in a room that has furniture which can be wiped clean.
For example, if you splatter some paint on a glass table, it can be wiped off or peeled away once dry. However, if you splatter some paint on a sofa, then this is going to be very hard to remove. Any items which are particularly valuable or important to you should be protected before painting a ceiling.
Hire a Professional
If you don’t have the means to move your furniture out of your room while the ceiling is painted, or if you’re physically unable to move your furniture, then you can hire a professional decorator to take the job out of your hands. Professional and experienced decorators who come with good, local recommendations will be able to paint a ceiling without causing any damage to your furniture.
They may do this by maneuvering furniture so that it is not positioned directly underneath the area of the ceiling being painted while also using drop cloths for extra protection. They may also have other skills or tactics they employ to ensure no drips from the ceiling make their way to the surfaces of your furniture.
While hiring a professional painter and decorator is going to cost you, for many people, the benefits are worth the expenditure. You can have your ceiling painted while you’re out of the house so it doesn’t impact you at all, and you can rest assured knowing that the ceiling will be painted to a high standard and all of your furniture and belongings will remain unharmed and unpainted.
