...It was worth it

5 hours of popcorn removal. 6 hours to putty and sand. 2 hours of painting. And we are done with the ceiling! It looks so much better! 

Again I'm learning as I go along so next room I'm sure I'll be able to knock off like 2 hours of sanding time using a technique that of course I didn't realize till the end  :)

 

 Cam gave the boys a try at the priming.

 

The ceiling reflects way more light now and the room is brighter. Ahem-- don't mind the mess I didn't bother to clean for a picture.

Here we go again!

We are on our third room now removing the popcorn. Now that we're into main living areas, we need to work when kids are sleeping.

 Randomly one night after the kids went to bed last week I started on it. The guest bedroom that we scraped took about 45 minutes so I figured this might take an hour and a half since its a larger room. I looked at the clock when I started 9:00pm. Prepping is a big deal since you spray the ceiling and all the wet mud falls to the floor (I nixed the specialty popcorn scraper tool from the store because it chewed up the ceiling in our other room so bad). I finished prepping at 10:30. About 10 minutes after I started removing the popcorn I realized I needed help from Cameron if I was going to sleep that night. We finished at 1:30am...just with scraping.

The next day I puttied all the nail holes and anything else that needed it.
Friday night, I started to sand everything and only got about half way because I got tired.
Still working on sanding today. I'm trying to keep a positive attitude by telling myself it will all be worth it in the end...maybe if I say it enough times it will work :)

Bedroom progress

I finished touching up, priming, and painting the bedroom ceiling. It ended up being a lot more work than expected because we got the ceiling a little too wet and when we scraped it damaged some of the drywall. But its all good because we have lots more ceiling to practice on.

Before

Progress

You can't tell too much but we also painted the walls and Cameron replaced the yellow electrical switches for white ones. We still have lots of work to finish eventually in here--for one, I can't wait to get rid of all the orange oak that goes throughout the house!

We like our popcorn in a bowl.

Our house has 2300 square ft of popcorn ceiling. In case you're wondering, that's our ENTIRE house. Closets, the ceiling portion and the inside of the window seat, and even the garage (and I didn't count the garage in the 2300 either!) We are not fans and we are excited to see it go. First up, one of the kids bedrooms. Right now all the boys share a room and don't want to be split up so the other one is empty. So it was an easy one to tackle. Surprisingly we got it done in less than an hour. We just sprayed with a pump water sprayer a section at a time, let it soak in a few minutes, and then scraped. And since we are dealing with so much popcorn we got one of those nifty popcorn scrapers that allows you to catch the popcorn in a trash bag when it falls. It kept the bulk of the mess off the floor which was nice.

The results were magical. In my art classes we talked about how texture in a painting brings something forward as a focal point, or to the foreground. Well the same goes for a textured ceiling- it makes the ceiling feel lower and closer. And without the popcorn... Seriously the ceiling looked like it grew a foot. (The photo doesn't do it justice)

Next up, mudding and sanding for a smooth ceiling finish and then priming!

By the time we finish with the whole house we are going to be popcorn removal masters!