.project five: ceilings

Technically our ceilings were project number one. But, to be honest, I was NOT going to blog about them. I’m mostly ashamed of how bad a job I did at planning this project. Oy. I only decided to blog about our ceiling reno today because I think I need to send out a warning to the world. So this is more of a "Do not do this at home!" post.

Our ceilings were the most frustrating part of our renovation by far. When we first got the house we couldn't get over how disgusting and dirty they were. Specifically in the kitchen. Just stained with grease that was caked onto the fixtures and everything else. The house stunk too… I was sure it was coming from the ceiling (and the old cabinets—yuck).

All of the light fixtures had to be repositioned and changed… plus we took out a pantry and a wall that left a big hole in the ceiling.

I don't really like popcorn ceilings much either, so we thought we'd try to make them smooth. We decided to try a little trick we learned from Mr. Internet and some youtube videos, like these:

Looks simple enough!

But no.

Our texture didn’t just come right off smoothly, we've since learned that this trick might only work if the ceiling hasn't been painted since the last time it was textured? Apparently ours was.

We sprayed and sprayed our ceilings (with a water/vinegar mixture and a garden sprayer) in the kitchen, living room and hallway and had to scrape every inch of it down. It was a mess! (Luckily we weren’t living here at that time)

 

And what we were left with was not nice and smooth. At all. We had made it more of a problem than we had in the first place. Huge mistake. (Goodness, the frustration of this time is all coming back to me as I look at these old pictures)

Anyway, we plugged on… we tore out the wall and old pantry. We moved into the house. Air did lots of electrical work and installed gorgeous pot lights, he moved the fixture over the kitchen table over a few feet (involving a major head injury in the attic), and the ceiling fan in the living room had to be moved a few feet over also. He patched all the holes.

This was all especially bad once we started getting quotes from ceiling contractors to get it retextured. Yikes. We decided that the best thing we could do, for the price, was to just get the popcorn put back up…

(**I have to mention here that this whole thing was my fault.. In the first place I convinced Aaron that we needed to take the old texture down and make the ceilings smooth and clean. I regret this so much… now I know all we should've done was paint over it and have a contractor patch the spots that had to be done due to our electrical work and the wall we took down. Oops.)

In July, we found an LDS guy (by some funny coincidences) who textures ceilings. Not the best price, but his website had some good testimonials etc. Also, he did some work for Air’s dad at church buildings.

He was a really cool guy and he did nice work… but since he most likely won’t ever read this, I have to tell you that I would not recommend him. He got paint and texture all over my newly painted walls and didn’t clean up after himself. He forgot to paint our bathroom ceilings (as was part of the agreement)… and even after promising to come back and do them (I kept contacting him about it) he wouldn’t show up and eventually just stopped responding!! What!??

(To this day, the bathroom ceilings still badly need to be painted. I guess we’ll get to that when we work on the bathrooms this summer..)

And, you know, whatever crazy route we had to take to end up with these ceilings, they turned out beautiful. Popcorn and all.

And now we know that our marriage can weather any storm as well… and thrive actually.

So there you have it!

…more to come, eventually