House Projects

Thanksgiving weekend we randomly decided to scrape the popcorn ceilings in the kitchen. We've been talking about doing this since we moved in 4 years ago but I never wanted to tackle the mess. Some how Chris convinced me it would only take a few days to scrape the ceiling, repaint, clean-up and put it all back together. So, Chris, our friend Jason and I started a project that quickly got out of control and took a lot longer then Chris thought. Part of that was because we also decided to take out the old lights and replace them with recessed cam lights. Tom was a huge help with doing those! All in all, the project took over a week but it looks 100 times better then it did and the new lights look awesome! We still have painted it yet.....

This is how we lived for a week!


Bye bye popcorn



As if that wasn't fun enough, some how Chris again convinced me to scrape the ceilings in our living room and formal dinning room. I don't know how I was so stupid! But during our Christmas time off from work we took on this new challenge. And again we decided to not only do the ceilings but to also demo our fireplace and put in tile and repaint the mantel and to finally mount our rear speakers in the ceilings. This project did start off easier since we learned a better technique and process from the last time. We had the ceilings scraped in no time and were ready for sanding, mudding, sanding again and texture. We soon found out that our vaulted ceiling had lots of problems and it took many days for Tom and Chris to fix the seams and tape, float and mud the ceilings. While we were waiting for all that to dry we worked on mounting our rear speakers in the ceiling. And again it took a lot longer then we thought. Poor Jason ended up spending many hours in the attic, but we did finally get them in and I love it! No more speaker stands for the dogs to knock over and no more speaker wire! The fireplace was pretty fun to demo and only took about an hour. We even got to use a jackhammer! When it came time to finally paint everything we ran into a few problems. Apparently we bought 2 different colors of white and didn't realize it until we had already painted everything. The ceiling, mantel and the beam all got 4 coats of paint. We still need to paint the ceiling in the kitchen and formal dinning room, but I really have no desire to get into that mess again! We're also taking break from scraping ceilings!

Prepped and ready to go


All the spots are from the dust in the room


The fireplace after we took off the limestone and the new box we built for the tile


I don't have any after pictures yet, but I will post some soon.