Ceiling Paint Calculator for Dubai Homes

The area might be the same. The paint used is not.

When you roll a wall, the paint that comes off the roller mostly goes on the wall. When you roll a ceiling, some of it comes straight back down. It lands on the sheet, on the ladder and on you.

You also load the roller lighter for a ceiling, because a heavy roller drips. A lighter roller means more passes, and more passes means more paint left in the tray and on the roller.

That is why this tool adds an allowance. Fifteen per cent is normal for hand rolling. If a spray gun is used it is more, because a spray mist does not all land where it was aimed.

Measure the floor. That is it for a normal square or rectangular room.

A lot of homes in Dubai have a false ceiling. It is a gypsum board ceiling hung under the real one, usually with lights set into it.

Two things about painting them. First, a stepped or coved false ceiling has more surface than the flat measurement, because the drops and the edges are surface too. Add ten to twenty per cent for a stepped design.

Second, gypsum board and its joints soak up paint unevenly. If the ceiling is new, or the joints have been filled and sanded, it wants a primer coat first. Without it, every taped joint shows as a stripe through the finish.

If your false ceiling has cove lighting hidden in a channel, remember that the inside of that channel gets painted too, and it is fiddly. Allow extra time as well as extra paint.

This is the most common ceiling problem in the UAE, and painting over it is usually the wrong first step.

A brown or yellow ring on a ceiling means water got in. In a flat it is usually a leak from the bathroom above, or a blocked AC drain. Paint does not fix a leak.

If you paint over a wet stain with normal emulsion, the stain bleeds back through in a few weeks. It happens every time. Even three coats will not stop it.

The right order is: find the leak, fix the leak, let the ceiling dry fully, then seal the stain with a stain block primer, then paint. Skip the sealing step and you will be doing it all again.

If you do not know where the water came from, that is worth finding out before you buy any paint at all.

Almost every ceiling gets a flat matt white. There is a reason for that beyond it being the default.

Matt has no shine, so it does not bounce light off the bumps. Ceilings are never perfectly flat, and any shine picks out every ripple and every joint. A silk or satin ceiling looks worse than a matt one, not better.

Ceiling paints are also made to drip less than wall paint. They are thicker in the tin and they hold onto the roller better, which matters when the surface is above your head.

The one place to change this is a bathroom. There a paint made for damp rooms is worth the extra, because a matt emulsion in a shower room grows mould at the edges.