Smoke Damage Restoration: How to Clean and Paint

LESLIE: Alright. Joyce in Missouri is on the line next with smoke damage. What is going on at your money pit?

JOYCE: Hi. I have a ceiling that got a bit of smoke damage from a propane fireplace. So, I don’t want to paint and have it bleed back through and then have to go paint again. Painting is a big enough job. I want to do it where it will stay white and not bleed through. So my question is: do I need to seal it, wash it? What do I need to do before I paint it?

LESLIE: If you’ve got smoke damage, generally, what is done – and that – are you seeing yellow stains? Is that what you’re seeing? Is it all over? Is it in a spot?

JOYCE: No. It’s a smoky color.

LESLIE: Alright. So because it’s a soot and the soot can tend to feel like a little bit oily or greasy, depending on what you were burning – I guess it’s from the propane – you might want to clean it a little bit first with TSP. You can find that in the paint center, in the painting aisle. It’s called “trisodium phosphate.” And you mix that up. And you can make it sort of a thicker consistency. And you want to wash those areas. See if you can get some of that soot off first.

And then once that’s all dry, you’re going to want to prime that wall. And prime the entire wall. And you can use an oil-based primer. That does tend to seal in those stains a little bit better and any sort of smoky odor that might have been there from whatever the damage was. And then once that’s dry, you can go ahead and put a latex paint over it. That’ll give you the color and that’ll, you know, ensure good adhesion of the paint to the primer to the wall.

And hopefully, then, if you’ve done a good job of sort of trying to clear away the extra soot and the stain and then sealing it with a primer, that shouldn’t bleed through. So that really does the trick.