I'm hosting a little meeting at work, so the house is starting to smell like the Trader Joe's pumpkin bread I'm making. I put dried cherries and raisins in there, so it's sort of holiday-ish.
Anyway, yesterday I mentioned that I had neglected to talk about item #14 on our list of home improvements, because it had slipped through the cracks. And that's an apt little idiom for this project - what it amounts to it fixing little cracks in the ceiling.
Way way back when in House of Mysteries in July last year, the final picture shows a hole in a pipe that had been hidden by the floorboards in my closet (floorboards that I have yet to replace, a task represented by #18 on our list). The plumbers replaced it, because it had secretly leaked over the years into the ceiling in the foyer and caused the ceiling to deteriorate.
Other places in the house had similar problems, but we weren't sure why. There are no pipes running above them. In the dining room, for example, we had some little cracks, and once we started chipping away at the ceiling, lots of the popcorny stuff came down...
...sometimes in big chunks.
It's ironic, since Sue hates the popcorn ceilings. She'd like them all to crack up, so we'd have a reason to replace them with something nicer. They are *everywhere* in the house except for the upstairs bathroom, basement and attic. We guess that it was the cheapest, fastest (but mainly the cheapest) way to make the ceilings look decent, as that would fit with the theme of all the other home repairs completed in the house before we arrived.
So at first, like around the attic pulldown, we fixed up the popcorn with this patching spray stuff (See Lots of Ps from April 28, 2009). Pain in the tush, because it got all over everything within a two block radius...
...on your clothes, on the floor, on your head, on the walls - miserable. Plus, it did not dry pure white. So I was not looking forward to using it again.
Then I talked with the paint guy at Adler's, and he suggested using actual white ceiling paint and adding in some popcorny stuff.
It still dripped and got on lots of stuff that didn't need patching, but it was a lot easier to use, and it did dry pure white. Here's how the dining room fix came out...
...and unfortunately, I couldn't find a before shot of the place in the foyer that needed patching, but here's how it's looking after one coat.
See how I need to put on a few more coats?
PS
Happy October!
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