Monday, September 28, 2009

Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!

So I might have mentioned to a few, or 15, of you that I had some foundation work done this spring. It was not the fun way I had anticipated spending that money, but keeping the house from falling apart ended up trumping any other plans. The southeast corner was where they had to do the majority of the work. It left some lovely cracks in the bedroom at that corner of the house. These are the 2 biggest cracks. And yes, that one ran up into the ceiling.

My house has the lovely popcorn & glitter ceiling that I hate. Since the crack was into the ceiling, I decided to finally tackle removing the popcorn. Afterall it's only a 10x10-ish sq foot room. It's not hard, it's just labor-intensive and MESSY!! That was not a fun day. (BTW, if you ever decide to take down a popcorn ceiling, always have it tested for asbestos first. Though I highly recommend hiring the job out if you are considering removing your popcorn ceilings. It's not fun.) I removed it and did the oh-so-fun cleanup then waited about a month to have any motivation to be in the room again. After sanding down the ceiling and creating another giant mess to clean up, I started in on the patching work. Due to the size of the cracks, I used mesh tape to first cover them.
Then I glopped on, I mean, expertly applied drywall compound.
Then came sanding, another big cleanup, priming, and painting. I primed & painted the ceiling too. I was pretty happy I had just enough primer & white paint in the paint can stash in the basement to finish the job without buying any more. I also had left over paint for the wall color from when I painted the room about a year & a half ago. And here is the finished product. The patch jobs may not be the most professional, but it's done. I was quite proud of my home-owner skills. I may have watched too much HGTV in my time, but it's come in handy.
Voila!

5 comments:

DeMo said...

Good job! That's awesome. I had fun taking down my popcorn ceiling, but didn't know any better and didn't have it tested for asbestos. Fortunately the house was built in the early 90s so I think I am ok...

The Youngs said...

I am totally impressed with it! You can do anything I have firgured out!

Lacy said...

come paint our house!!! It's needs your magic touch...our right brains are helpless in this arena. Abstract painting doesn't really flow when it comes to the exterior of a home!

Jennifer said...

A-It's houses built before the 1970s that asbestos could be in it.
H-Thanks :-)
L-It took me a year of driving around looking at paint schemes to decide what I wanted on the exterior. And then it took 3 tries to get the right paint color. "Bright Artichoke" was a major mistake. Found out it was a grey-toned green rather than a yellow-toned green that gave me the look I wanted. I finally took the paint color strips & placed them on different parts of the house at different times of the day to find out what it looked like in all the different light to choose the right color. And then I hired a professional to paint.

Alan said...

I could use someone with your skills here in Israel! :-)