Painting Concrete: DIY-Tutorial & Pro-Tips

Concrete is a great building material that can be used both indoors and outdoors. Whether it's the concrete wall in your garden or the smoothly polished exposed concrete in your home, we'll show you how to paint boring grey concrete to bring colour into your home.

Table of contents:

1. Before / After photos from our community
2. Preparation: How to choose the right colour for your concrete project
3. Painting concrete professionally: Instructions from MissPompadour
4. FAQ: Frequently asked questions
5. Materials and accessories for painting concrete

Before / After photos from our community

Preparation: How to choose the right colour for your concrete project

Concrete can generally be painted very well. Especially our MissPompadour Eggshell Varnish is perfect for both exterior and interior concrete surfaces.
Indoors, concrete can of course also be painted with wall paint. Here you can choose between the MissPompadour wall paints The Functional Wall Paint, The Valuable Wall Paint and the LittlePomp chalk paints. The difference lies mainly in the durability. The Functional Wall Paint is a washable paint that you can really put up with a lot, while The Valuable Wall Paint is less robust but more ecological. Our LittlePomp chalk paints impress with their particularly powdery matt surface and the delicate colour shades.

What do you want to paint?

Many elements in your house can be made of concrete: stairs, walls, floors or ceilings. Indoors, concrete walls or ceilings are usually made of slightly open-pored concrete, which needs a lot of paint because of its rough structure, but is basically easy to paint. However, you must seal a screed with a separate screed primer before painting.
Exposed concrete is smoothly polished concrete that is also easy to paint. You can find it as wall, ceiling or floor elements.
Painting stairs - at least indoors - is no problem either. However, if it is an exterior concrete staircase, you must bear in mind that our paints do not tolerate standing water. In this case, you cannot paint the horizontal surfaces.

Do you want to paint concrete outdoors or indoors?

Concrete can be found outdoors, for example, as a garden wall, in the staircase leading down to the cellar or as the sturdy uprights of the garden fence. Even if you want to paint your garage door, you may come across concrete to the left and right of it, which may also need a new coat of paint
If you want to paint concrete on the outside, we recommend using our varnishes. For the interior, you can also work with wall paints.

Which concrete do you want to paint?

While a screed or plaster is usually laid over the rough utility concrete, especially indoors, the smoothly polished exposed concrete is increasingly being used as an effective stylistic element. If you want to paint concrete on the inside, first clean it thoroughly and apply a primer if necessary. Then you can paint the exposed concrete very well. However, concrete can also be very coarse and absorb a lot of paint. In this case, a primer is definitely advantageous to even out the absorbency.

Painting concrete professionally: Instructions from MissPompadour

Painting concrete will bring you joy because it's easy and the result always looks great, whether you want to paint your concrete floor, ceiling or walls.

Step 1: Thorough cleaning

The first thing to do is to thoroughly clean all the surfaces you want to paint. Especially outdoors, it is important to remove cobwebs and dust as well as coarse dirt and green discolouration. The best way to do this is to use our To Clean - MissPompadour Cleaner. This will give you a dust and grease-free surface.

Step 2: Cover and tape off

Cover everything that needs to be protected from paint splashes, such as the floor, with foil, fleece or cardboard. Simply tape over door and window frames or other parts that are not to be painted.

Step 3: Repairing damaged areas

With the To Fill - MissPompadour Filler you can also take this opportunity to repair old drill holes and quirks that you want to make disappear.

Step 4: Primer

It is not absolutely necessary to apply a primer to concrete. However, To Bond - MissPompadour Prim er can be helpful for open-pored and therefore very absorbent concrete. The primer ensures an even surface and thus less paint consumption. If there are impurities on the painted surface - such as water marks, blood stains or biros marks - then use To Block - MissPompadour Stainblock or MissPompadour - To Prime Walls. This prevents these traces of use from showing through the paint layer again later - especially if you use wall paints.

Step 5: Painting the concrete

To Paint concrete you can use brushes, rollers or spray systems. You should always apply two coats. If the concrete is very rough and absorbent, you can dilute the paint with about 10% water for the first coat.

FAQ: Frequently asked questions

Material and Accessories for Painting Concrete

Besides the paint itself, you will need the following items to paint your concrete surfaces:

• Broom, bucket and cleaning cloth: To Clean the surfaces.
• Cleaner : For a clean, dust and grease free surface, use our environmentally friendly To Clean - MissPompadour Cleaner.
• plastic drop clothand tape: To protect those surfaces that are not to be painted and to prevent unwanted paint splashes, use our transparent plastic drop cloth. To mask, use To Mask - MissPompadour Adhesive Tape in various sizes.
• filler and sandpaper:To fill in old holes or scratches, To Fill - MissPompadour Filler is very suitable. Then sand with To Sand - MissPompadour Sanding Pad.
• Brush, paint roller or spray system: For precise painting you can use our To Paint - Fine MissPompadour Brush in different sizes. If you want to paint large areas, such as a concrete ceiling, our paint roller, which we offer in two sizes, is suitable for wall paints. For varnishes we recommend our varnish roller for water-based varnishes. You can also spray particularly large areas. The Wagner paint spray system is available for this purpose.