After storm Eunice and storm Franklin swept over the UK last week, I felt it was a good time to write up a quick DIY post on how to quickly and easily get rid of those horrible brown water stains that can appear on your ceiling. These blemishes are often caused by missing, broken, or loose roof tiles allowing an ingress of rainwater (although, you can also get them on lower-lever floors when there are leaks to pipes located between the ceiling and the floor above it). Once the issue with the leak has been located and rectified (it’s always good to find Commercial Roof Surveys in your area if you have reoccurring water regression), it might feel like quite an exhaustive task to paint the whole ceiling - especially if the staining is minimal. When I decorated my bedroom last year, I discovered an excellent product that got rid of these stains in less than 10 minutes. It has become one of my ‘go-to’ products, so today on the blog, I thought I would share some of my ‘before & after’ results using it.

Now, the only downside with this product is that your ceiling needs to be white to begin with. If your ceiling is matt white, then you have no issue. However, if your ceiling is painted in a vibrant on-trend colour, I’m afraid this product cannot be used as a quick fix!

Zinsser Covers Up is an aerosol with a vertical nib (so it handily sprays upwards rather than ‘out’). It has a stain blocker in it as well as a touch-up paint so the stain will not push through (if you try and touch up your ceiling with just basic paint these aggressive stains will still be visible).

Covering the floor and the furniture below where you are spraying, hold the can the recommended distance as described on the side of the can and lightly spray a gentle mist onto the stains. I found that doing two light coats was a lot better than one heavy coat which could merge and form drips.

You can see the end result from what was before in the image above. If you are really looking for the stains you may still be able to see them very faintly, but otherwise, you’d never know! Covers Up can be quite hard to get hold of, but Mano Mano is selling it here with free delivery.

If the damage to your ceiling is really bad and you decide that you want to paint it entirely, then I would highly recommend Ceiling Pro 5-in-1 as it also seals, primes, blocks, and fills in any hairline cracks.