Drop ceilings or suspended ceilings can be painted. Normally, ceiling tiles get painted because they may have yellowed from nicotine or look dingy from age. Sometimes, another color is perferred for the ceiling rather than the standard white. Other times the tiles get stained from a water leak and need to be fixed.
Ceiling tiles are easy to paint. There is little surface preparation needed, since the tiles themselves are not glossy and accept paint very well.
Painting in place
The easiest and fastest way to paint ceiling tiles is to paint them in place. You will be painting the grid and the tiles all in one shot. Not all ceilings can be done in place. With some suspended ceilings the tiles are too loosely held in place, which will not permit rolling them. You could however, spray such a ceiling without any problems.
Removing the tiles
If you have a ceiling that will not permit rolling (and you don’t want to spray them), or if you don’t want to paint the metal grids, you will need to pull all the tiles from the ceiling and lay them out on a drop cloth or two for rolling. Removing the tiles takes quite a bit longer to do, but it allows for rolling a normally un-roll-able ceiling. You will need to mark (on the top - unseen side) any special cut / size tiles with a note as to the location so that re-installation will go smoothly after painting.
Whte pigmented shellac as a primer / finish
The simplest way to paint the tiles is using a shellac stain blocker. Shellac stain blockers are white, will block out any water or nicotine stains, and since they do not yellow can be used as a primer / finish on the tiles. Shellac dries quickly and you can double coat the ceiling tiles with an hour dry time between coats. You don’t have to use the shellac as your finish paint, the option is there. If you prefer, you can use a latex paint over the top (either tinted or white) of the shellac primer. See BIN primer.
You can tint white pigmented shellac to a color too if you prefer to use shellac as your finish paint. -see “Tinted Shellac Paint”.
Use a fine nap roller to roll the metal grids, and a medium nap length for the tiles themselves.
Spot painting
If you have a simple water stained tile or two, you can paint the offending tile and leave the rest unpainted. The key here is to match the paint to the color of the rest of the unpainted tile. You may be able to use BIN shellac primer as a primer/finish if the sheen is similar. Most tiles are a dead flat and will require a flat latex paint over the top of your stain blocker for a color and sheen match. See “How to Match Paint”.You will probably not be able to literally paint the “spot” only, but will have to paint the affected tile(s) in total.
Specialty aerosol primer/finish paints
There are a few different aerosol spray primer / finish paints made for stain blocking and finish painting dropped ceiling tiles. Zinsser’s version is called “Covers Up”. Test a spot an be sure of the color match. See Covers Up Pdf, and see the video of a similar product (different brand) being used in the video tutorial below.
Painting Ceiling Tiles
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