A year ago today…

So when we first looked at the house that we now live in we were like “popcorn ceilings, really?”…”and they are sparkly”.  I was sure they could be removed fairly easily, but the Hubs was not so sure.  By the time that we had looked at the house a second time I had researched popcorn ceiling removal.  Seamed easy enough, I was all for removing them.  The hubs was all “No way!”  He was sure that we could paint them heavily to cover the sparkles and “knock down” the texture a bit.

Before we painted, I did a quick cleaning of all the floors, bathrooms and cobwebs in the corners, while Hubs removed all the nails, etc. and patched the holes to prep for painting.  I meticulously vacuumed every square inch of a room then remembered, “Oh hey I better get the cobwebs”.  I used my handy wand to reach up and trace the top edge of all the walls and then to my dismay saw all the popcorn crumbs on the floor that I had just vacuumed.  Oh this stuff was already getting old.

Day one of painting and we decide to start with the ceilings first and work down, because that is how we always paint a room.  We started with the bedrooms figuring they were the rooms that hinged upon us moving in.  We need a place to sleep, right?

Hubs goes to town with some architectural primer because the ceilings had never been painted before, in forty years, not one.  I was in charge of cutting in as he rolled behind me.  All was well and we started on the ceiling white.  The Hubs is a “dry to the touch” kind of painter and doesn’t believe in following those annoying suggested dry times on the paint cans.   So as I started the second coat of ceiling white I noticed something…

Me: Honey, you should come look at this, I think we have a problem.

Hubs: It isn’t drying fast enough

Me: No, I think that the popcorn is going to fall of the ceiling

Hubs: What?

Me: It is all cracking and it looks like it got so wet that it is going to come down.

He then looked at under the brightness of his utility light, proceeded to jab one of the cracking spots with the end of his the light and it came of like gentle falling snow.  After getting a putty knife and swiping at a few spots we saw a ceiling in very good shape.  A flat, smooth, non sparkly ceiling. Thankfully we went full on plastic tarping for the painting project.

See, Hubs was concerned all along that the ceiling was not properly finished underneath and would require extensive cosmetic patching after the removal.  That was his hesitation all along.  I set about painting the bathroom ceiling and trim to stay out of his way while he scraped away at the bedrooms.

That night the Hubs looked at my aforementioned research and the rest of the ceilings came down with water, not paint, and lots of plastic sheeting.

I think I will be sucking some of the remnants of this stuff up for years.  We put a lot of plastic down and it still managed to find its way behind baseboards and other woodwork. Even so, I am SO GLAD we did this.  Look at the difference in the reflection of the light off the ceiling.  The house got so much brighter from this project.  For all the mass it caused, I highly recommend it.