Washing the Ceiling

I've been washing the old paint off the ceiling. It involves hours on the scaffolding, bent over backwards. It reminds me of seeing this sketch Michelangelo made of himself painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling when I was studying art history in school.

I began by working my way down the hall on Saturday. It was mixed rainy and windy and sunny all day, so I hedged my bets and stayed mostly indoors. I made it as far as I could get without interfering with Noel's woodwork stripping, which was far enough for me to wake up sore the next day.

The area around the rosette is considerably harder going. I have to put in a fair amount of work to make any progress, and some of the paint seems disinclined to come off at all. Where it will come off I made good progress.

But there are little peninsulas of gray sticking into the clean plaster that I spent nearly an hour scrubbing at. At this point I'm thinking if it doesn't come off with this much scrubbing it might not be an issue to just paint over it.

I'm not sure how we're going to handle the rosette. It's been painted, and the paint slops onto the plaster (of course). It's also dirty. Will it come clean with a wash? Or will we destroy it trying to make it look like it didn't spend several decades closed in a dropped ceiling?

For now I'm just working on the gray paint.

posted by ayse on 04/02/12