Thread: Best way to clean Walls and Ceilings before painting?

Dear Lads and Ladies,

Has anyone come up with a novel way for cleaning walls and ceilings before painting, that is better than the traditional method of getting up on a ladder and killing your arms and shoulders rubbing everything over with a rag that is dripping-wet with water and Sugar Soap that runs down your arm?

The last time I had a couple of flats to paint, I first sprayed a section of the wall or ceiling in question with a Sugar Soap solution using a garden-variety (literally...) pump-up pressure sprayer, and then scrubbed it while it was still wet with a wide-head broom. I then sponged the dirty moisture off using a wringable-sponge type mop (both broom and mop can be seen in the first photo below), that I was first dipping into a "hobby" type plastic box filled with clean water for rinsing purposes. I had a cord tied to the mop’s wringing-lever so that I could regularly squeeze out the excess moisture that came back off the surface being cleaned. The cord was necessary because the whole mop was on an extension pole so that I could reach up to the ceilings with it when holding it down at waist height. When it was time to wring the mop out, I would hold the head down low over another plastic hobby box (an empty one this time) and pull on the cord to squeeze out the dirty water. I would then move on to the next patch of wall or ceiling and repeat the whole spray/scrub/mop process...

Now this method might sound heaven-sent to a long-suffering "ladder and ragger", and it actually worked out okay, but it wasn’t perfect by any means for the following reasons:

1) Whilst pretty safe on walls, you had to be very careful when doing ceilings this way, because if you sprayed too much soapy water up there, or let it sit up there for too long, it soaked upwards through the plasterboard into the roof cavity (where years of dirt sat patiently waiting for just such an opportunity...) and then "wicked" that dirt back down with it to the underside of the sheeting when you dried off the ceiling again with the squeegy mop. The result: stains in the plasterboard that often ended up coming back out through the fresh ceiling paint that went over the top of them...

2) There was a lot of dripping onto the floor during the process (as in A Lot...) A carpet clean, at the very least, would be necessary afterwards if you weren’t planning to replace the carpets.

3) It was very difficult to find a wide-head broom with just the right stiffness - not too much or too little - for good upside-down scrubbing.

4) The sponge on the squeegy mop wasn’t really designed to take the higher to-and-fro forces that are applied to it when you are pushing and pulling it at the end of a long pole across a slightly-grabby surface like a painted wall or ceiling, compared to letting it just glide across something smooth and slippery like a tiled floor. Normally it sticks out a fair way (see the second photo below). Therefore, in order to stop the mop’s sponge-head from tearing off at it’s base, I had to first tie a little ring (like a keyring) into the cord that I pulled on the wringing-lever with, and then slip that ring over a hook that I had sticking out of the handle about half way down. The resulting "half-pull" on the wringing-lever kept the amount of the mop’s sponge-head that was sticking out beyond the squeeze-rollers sufficiently small enough that "sponge-wobble" was controlled (see the third photo below). But the whole process of hooking and unhooking that little ring over the hook during every mopping "cycle", in order to completely wring the mop, was very cumbersome indeed...

5) The whole method wasn’t too useful on walls in hallways, for obvious reasons...

6) It was still fairly hard yakka - just not quite as hard as doing it the old-fashioned way with a ladder, a rag, and old-fashioned elbow grease...

Now I’ve got a brace of internal paintjobs coming up soon, so I am therefore trying to think of a better way to do the cleaning than my usual method as described above. I’m sort of thinking along the lines of something to do with either Steam Cleaning using a wide-head attachment, or some type of powered "turbo" scrubbing head hooked up to a Spray Extraction Unit (like the carpet cleaners use, but hopefully smaller, lighter, and scrubbier...). Cost, however, is a problem. Karcher’s commercial-grade steam cleaner: http://www.karcher.com.au/aus/Produc...0922800.htm is a near $2000 exercise, and I don’t even know whether or not the steam wont just end up peeling the flat acrylic paint off the ceiling instead of cleaning it...
Karcher’s smallest Spray Extraction Unit: http://www.karcher.com.au/aus/Produc...s/11001030.htm is also costly, at about $1400, and there doesn’t seem to be any pictures on their website of a suitable powered scrubbing-head for it. But at least you could put some Sugar Soap into it, which not only cleans but etches the old paint in preparation for the new.

Have any of you come up with a manual method more clever for the job than a ladder and a rag?
Do any of you use some similarly crazy technique to mine, but have found a better type of mop to use than the one I do?
Maybe there’s some machine already out there that’s set up to do exactly what I want with some sort of powered scrubbing head, but at a reasonable price?
How do the pro-painters clean walls and ceilings?
Any ideas anyone?...

Many Thanks,
Batpig.