Now that the new boards were all in, it was time to scrape the old boards of all their loose paint and then paint the entire ceiling. Scraping shipping paint off of tongue-and-groove over my head turned out to be a process I had very little patience for, so after a very cursory process involving several hours on consecutive evenings, I decided to embrace the bumpiness of old paint as adding character, and went ahead and primed the whole surface. Painting ceilings isn’t that terrible, as long as you have an extension handle for your roller, and a comfortable brush for getting into all of the grooves. My ceiling took three coats – one of primer, and two of exterior paint. I’d originally planned to paint it a light blue, but the paint I was going to use (leftover from the front door) had gone bad, and I realized I wasn’t particularly interested in drawing attention to my porch ceiling, so simple white actually made more sense.