I love our house. There is just one tiiiiiiiny little problem. I cannot stand popcorn ceilings. And guess what? Our house is chock full of them - including on all of the vaulted ceilings. (The silver lining here is that our house isn't that big.)
Kaylee's room was the first room that I knew I had to do some work in. I can handle all the dark trim, the wall colors, etc. in the other rooms, but a black and red, creepy room, it just simply wouldn't work for my little 3-year-old. No way. She went into her room and she said "Mommy, it's dark."
First thing, the popcorn ceiling had to go. I figured I might as well, since I wanted to paint everything anyway. And I wanted to try it out, see how doable it really was to scrape the stuff off, because most everything I'd read online said it was a pretty big job, but not very difficult to do. Just took some time and effort. There were a couple of places that said it was way too much work for what it's worth, and one that said it was SO EASY!
First, I covered the floor with plastic. Now I will warn you that if you ever do this, REALLY cover the floor with plastic. I always struggle with plastic so much, and of course all the edges ended up coming off and leaving a few inches of carpet on all sides to get nice and covered in popcorn. I vacuumed it up later, but I still need to go over it some more. We have a pretty..."plush" carpet up there, and I think there may still be a few layers of popcorn and drywall dust hiding in there. Yuck!
The next thing I did was choose an area of about 9 square feet, and took my trusty little spray bottle and sprayed away. Now, every single tutorial I read said to use a garden sprayer, and really soak the ceiling. Well, I didn't HAVE a garden sprayer, so I used a little water bottle. Don't laugh! It worked. Sort of...my bottle broke halfway through. Nothing that a quick trip to Target and $2 couldn't remedy, though. ;)
After the ceiling was good and wet in the area I wanted to work in, I used a sturdy 6 inch drywall knife to carefully scrape off the popcorn. It came off in big chunks, and there wasn't much dust. I did end up with bruises on both of my palms by the end, but that's okay.
Once the popcorn was all off, I went over the spots where I'd ripped the paper covering with drywall mud, let it dry, and sanded everything very lightly. I didn't try to make it totally smooth, I wanted a little texture. Okay, I was exhausted and didn't want to sand anymore, but we'll just pretend I wanted texture.
After that I dusted the ceiling, and primed the whole room. One coat on the ceiling, two coats on the walls and trim. Then one coat of ceiling paint, two coats of wall color and trim. Whew! Lots of work, but I got it all done in 4 days, even with packing, unpacking, and taking care of two kids. I'm so lucky my kids are very self-sufficient and can play for hours without getting into TOO much trouble. I just make sure to do a lot of checking up on them, and everybody's happy.
I took this picture pretty late in the day and it was getting dark, so you won't really get the full effect of the difference it made. I can't wait to finish it all now and get her things in there. Oh, and we didn't change the carpet color - it's just a very different exposure than the "before" picture.
So, the final verdict: was it worth it? YES, a thousand times yes. The popcorn actually darkened the room more than I even thought it did (I guess because it made a million little shadows on the ceiling), and when it was gone, I felt like the ceiling was higher. I felt a little "closed in" before, and taking the popcorn off totally changed that feeling. An absolutely amazing difference. I know that it wasn't just the wall color changing either, because I felt the difference before I did anything with the walls at all. Of course, lightening up those helped immensely as well. I am rather determined to do all the ceilings in the house, but I have no idea how long that will take. I think I'll just take it slow and work on it little by little. My husband thinks I'm a bit nuts, but he probably would either way, so I won't let that stop me!
We bought our washer and dryer, and the whole time I knew that Will was DYING because he absolutely fell in love with that little puppy. I was terrified of the idea, but I finally caved, and we went right back to the pet store and put down a deposit, so we could pick her up the next day. That night (before we picked her up) I had nightmares all night long about really bad little puppies. We got all the needed supplies yesterday and picked her up last night. She's super adorable, and the kids love her. (The feeling is mutual, of course.) I think she'll be a great dog for us. Please cross your fingers and send me good luck to get this "difficult to train" dog house-trained!! It's going to be a crazy few weeks here.
