work [in progress]

"Widespread rumors of this blog's demise have been greatly exaggerated."

-Troy Mouer, Kingswood Redux

Quick update: We have multiple renovations going at once and are trying to plan a complete main bathroom overhaul as well. Oh yeah...and a 2-yr old! So blogging has definitely taken a back seat to real life. BUT...we're still very committed to the blog and hope to bring it up to date at some point. We don't just want to show before and afters because those aren't the kind of blogs that we found helpful as we took on many first-time DIY tasks. As always, thanks for stopping by and stay tuned for more!

Textured Ceiling [No More]

You may remember us mentioning the textured ceiling in the office in a previous post. Not sure if you can tell by the picture (you may have to click it to enlarge it), but it was not a sprayed acoustical ceiling (i.e. popcorn ceiling) -- it was a very thick plaster-type textured effect that had been applied to the ceiling at some point in the house's history. Luckily this was the only room it had been applied in. And further, this was the smallest of the major rooms in the house. But don't be fooled, removing any type of a textured ceiling is one of the toughest and dirtiest "light" remodeling jobs there is.

From the day we first saw the house, we knew it was something that would have to be addressed at some point. The question of when to do it became obvious when we discovered the wood floors. It just made sense to do it before having the floors refinished. However, the question of what to do with it wasn't so obvious. We considered scraping it off, skim-coating the ceiling to level out the valleys, covering it with drywall, covering it with ceiling panels, or covering it with birch plywood. There were pros and cons to each potential solution.

Finally, it came time to begin and we decided, almost by default, to scrape it off in hopes of leveling out the ceiling. We thought that if we could scrape it, do a bit of sanding to level it off enough and then use a good flat ceiling paint, it might hide the craters enough that we could live with it. So...the scraping began. Using hats, leather gloves, eye protection, dust masks and a paint scraper, we took short shifts scraping. In the picture below you can see a row where we managed to scrape away the major texture -- what was left was a crater-looking surface, much like that of the moon.

I can't even begin to describe the mess. There are no other pictures of the process because, frankly, after taking these two pics, it was the very last thing on our minds! And here's the kicker...after we had finished scraping more than half of the ceiling, I removed the light and vent you see in the first picture, and what do you know, the texture started to peel away from the original drywall like it had in the guest bedroom. Time to make another decision -- stick to our original plan, or try and remove all of the texture down to the original drywall?

We went with option #2 and the long and tedious process of chipping away began. Much like our experience in the guest bedroom, there were some spots that peeled away with ease, but this was definitely the minority. In a number of spots we had to resort to water and sponging to loosen the plaster texture in order to scrape it down with the putty knife. The final step was drywall patching and finishing. Did I mention the mess?? A number of evenings and some very sore necks and arms later, it was another memory to be tucked away (and quickly forgotten) in this greater remodeling scheme!

Looking Up

Although our living room wall (at 13') and sloped ceiling add a unique architectural element to our house's interior, they pose quite a challenge when it comes to painting. So when it came time to paint the living room ceiling, I looked into the possibility of renting a small section of scaffolding. Turns out that with a little planning and the right vehicle (umm...a truck) you can rent a set for about $25 per day. In our case, it was well worth it.

My dad managed to roll the bottom-half of the ceiling with his 8'-16' extension pole, but it would have been a real struggle to get clean coats on the upper-half without the scaffolding. Not to mention the ease of trimming out the corners and edges while standing on a flat surface (instead of having to balance on a ladder and then going up and down it a million times). I almost stepped off of the catwalk a few times (I guess I was REALLY getting into the painting), but luckily managed to avert any major disasters! We easily got two coats on in one day and were able to return the scaffolding later that evening.

We didn't finish all the ceilings as we had originally hoped. As we were removing the old flush-mounted light fixture in the guest bedroom, a piece of the textured ceiling came loose. In fact, it just peeled away with very little effort. We debated about what to do -- patch it or remove it -- and finally decided to try and remove all of the texture down to the original drywall. We used putty knives and I would say that 90% of it peeled off with little effort; BUT the other 10% was about as tedious as it gets.

And I don't even want to think about the heavy "starlight" texture on the ceiling in the office. We still haven't figured out what to do with it; but that's for another post.