Spike Carlsen: Hi! I am Spike Carlsen; I'm a contributing editor at the Family Handyman Magazine, the leading Do It Yourself and home improvement magazine on the planet.

We're looking at troublesome and tricky painting areas, and one area people encounter a lot of problems is with textured ceilings. The two main problems are creating a clean straight line along the edge and then also getting the ceiling painted without it starting the flick off and come down on you.

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We can show you how to solve that problem with two simple tools. One is a straight plated screwdriver; the other is a long nap roller. We're going to start out by creating a straight edge by running this screwdriver right along the wall to knock-off the access texture.

Just take your straight edge screwdriver and very lightly run it along, you see you're knocking off the little bumps that are vermiculite and this is going to allow you to create a straight edge where the ceiling meets the wall.

Do it around your whole room, do it real lightly. Once you've established a clean line you want to protect your wall. We have a newly painted wall here so we're using a easy release painters tape. We're using a Frog delicate painters tape, and we're going to apply it in two-fourth sections, you want to lightly position it, push it in place lightly with your fingers and till you have it where you want it, and then use a putty knife or your painter's tool to press it in place.

One of the advantages of FrogTape is it has a special coating and when the paint hits it, it makes an even cleaner line. Something like light textures are harder to just remove. In that case, start out by applying long strips of masking tape around the canopy of the light to protect the light where it hits the ceiling. Once that's done you want to use plastic to protect the light fixture itself.

So whether you're using a brush or a roller, the main thing to do is start with a loaded brush or a loaded roller, go up and get it once and don't keep messing around with it. If you're very meticulous you might be able to get by without using plastic, but for the most part it's a good idea to put plastic on top of that to protect your walls as you paint.

One of the keys is to use a thick nap roller; this is about a 3/4 inch nap, a lot of the ones that you buy at a home center or hardware store, the standard one is more like 3/8th inch. So the key is to use a thick nap roller, load it up with paint. It's really best to do what professional painters do; they use a five gallon bucket and a screen. It allows you to really get the roller loaded up with plenty of paint so that you don't have to keep going back over, you can do everything in one nice swap.

We're going to bring it up, do it one nice layer, don't go over it a bunch of times, Overlap just the hair, not a lot but overlap the other one just a hair and keep moving.

Like I say, if you over work one area you're going to get the texture overly wet, when it gets overly wet it start to pulling away and once one little section of ceiling starts falling away the rest will gradually come off as you work along with it.

We've let it dry, now we're going to do one more nice thick coat, perpendicular to that and let it dry and we'll be done.

Okay, we've finished our second coat. We did the first coat this way; we did the second coat perpendicular to it. Both were nice stick coats. Just run over it once, watch away so we didn't pull any of the ceiling texture down and that's how you paint a textured ceiling.