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 paint for your concrete project

Concrete is generally very easy to paint. Our Easy Eggshell! is perfect for concrete surfaces, both indoors and outdoors.
Indoors, concrete walls can also be painted with wall paint. Here, you can choose between the MissPompadour wall paints ‘The Functional Wall Paint! ’ and ‘The Valuable Wall Paint! ’. The main difference lies in their durability. ‘The Functional Wall Paint! ’ is a washable paint that can really be put through its paces, whilst ‘The Valuable Wall Paint! ’ is less robust but, in return, is extra-matt and preservative-free in accordance with VdL-RL 01.

What do you want to paint?

Many elements in your home can be made of concrete: stairs, walls, floors or ceilings. For interior concrete walls or ceilings, slightly porous concrete is usually used, which requires a lot of paint due to its rough texture, but is basically easy to paint. However, a screed must be sealed with its own screed primer before painting.
Fair-faced concrete is smooth, polished concrete that is also easy to paint. You can find this as a wall, ceiling or floor element.
Painting stairs - at least indoors - is also not rocket science. However, if it is an external 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 stairs leading down to the cellar or as sturdy supports for 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 colour.
If you want to paint concrete on the outside, you should use Easy Eggshell! Indoors, 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 use this opportunity to repair old drill holes and imperfections that you want to make disappear.

Step 4: Primer

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

Step 5: Painting the concrete

You can use brushes, roller brushes or spray systems to paint concrete. You should always apply two coats of paint. If the concrete is very rough and absorbent, you can dilute the colour with around 5-10% 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:

• Brooms, buckets and cleaning cloths: For cleaning surfaces.
• Cleaning products: To ensure your surface is clean, dust-free, and grease-free, we recommend using our eco-friendly ‘To Clean’ – MissPompadour cleaner.
• Protective sheeting and masking tape: To protect areas you don't want to paint and to prevent unwanted paint splashes, use our transparent painter’s tarpaulin. Our ‘Zum Wand Abkleben – MissPompadour’ masking tape, available in various sizes, is ideal for masking.
• Filler and sandpaper:‘To Fill – MissPompadour’ filler is ideal for filling old holes or imperfections. Afterwards, smooth the surface with ‘To Sand – MissPompadour’ sanding fleece.
• Paintbrush, paint roller or spray system: For precise work, use our ‘Zum Streichen – Fine MissPompadour Brush’, available in various sizes. If you're painting large areas, such as a concrete ceiling, our paint roller – which we offer in two sizes – is ideal for wall paints. For lacquers, we recommend our lacquer roller for water-based lacquers. Alternatively, you can also spray particularly large surfaces.