Cracking (crazing) in bathroom paint

The paint on the walls of my bathroom is cracking-looks almost like crazing on an old piece of china. The cracks are not very deep- probably 1-2 layers of paint, but they are throughout almost all of the walls, but doesn't seem to be on the ceiling. We have painted this room 4 times in 20 years, the last time about 7-8 years ago. At that time, we installed a large exhaust fan due to mold & mildew accumulating because of no circulation of air, cleaned up all the mold and mildew with bleach, painted with 2 coats of Kilz and then 2 coats of white semi-gloss paint. We did use a good brand of paint at that time. The cracking started about 3-4 years ago, and hasn't really gotten any worse in the past couple of years, but still looks bad. We want to repaint with a gloss white, but not until we can figure out what's caused this and how to prevent it from happening on the next coat of paint. Replacing the sheetrock and ceramic tile are both out, and hubby refuses to allow wallpaper. He says bathroom is too humid and the wallpaper would come off within a few months. Has anyone ever seen this or have any suggestions on 1) what caused this; 2) how to cover this up for the next coat of paint; and 3) how to prevent this from happening next time?

Comments

1 Responses to Cracking (crazing) in bathroom paint

  1. blake_50 on 2008-07-29 14:56:23.955937

    i'm just gonna quietly jump in here... if these walls had been papered before painting, and the glue from the wallpaper was not cleaned off, that can cause crazing as well... tiny, little, crackly looking lines in the paint, sometimes in interesting geometric patterns too, like tiny squares and such....

Leave a Reply