While I’ve been scraping away at the popcorn ceiling texture on the main floor, the upstairs bathroom has been progressing quite well. Drywall has been taped, mudded (is that a word?), sanded, textured, and finally, painted. After living with boring, bland, and/or dark colors, we decided to liven the room up a bit. With yellow:

Okay, it isn’t quite that yellow in person, but it is yellow none-the-less. Once we get the dark woodwork, and the white claw foot tub, toilet, and pedestal sink in here, it won’t be quite as blinding. We hope.

The part on the light fixtures that hold the shades are new, non-lacquered brass. These will be aged to match the fixture better in the future. Casey also had to have her antique toilet paper holder installed, even though we don’t have a toilet in there yet.

Hard to notice is the hole to the left of the chimney. This is where a cabinet will be built for towels and toiletries. We will also have wood corner trim running along the edges of the drywall next to the chimney.

As I mentioned in my last post, removing painted on popcorn ceiling texture is one of the worst jobs I’ve done. Non-painted texture? That stuff is a walk in the park.

In the last week, I’ve removed popcorn ceiling from the upstairs bathroom, and from the main floor living/dining room. The former was not painted, the latter was.

Removing the non-painted (or lightly painted) popcorn ceiling is as follows:

1. Take a large putty knife (8″ or so) and knock off the bigger popcorn
2. Take a spray bottle or a garden sprayer and get the stuff as moist as you can without having it drip all over
3. Let sit for 5 minutes or so
4. Take the large putty knife and scrape off the goop
5. Have a beer

Removing the heavily painted (and possibly multiple textured) popcorn ceiling is as follows:

1. Have a beer
2. Schedule a back/neck/shoulder massage for the day you plan to be done (add a day or two overage)
3. Have a beer
4. Find an ice scraper (the kind you use to remove ice from a driveway, about 6-8″ wide and with a 4′ or so handle), and sharpen up the edge
5. Attempt to scrape off as much of the large popcorn as possible
6. Take a garden sprayer and moisten the ceiling. It will only penetrate the areas you knocked off in the last step
7. Wait 5 minutes
8. Spray the ceiling again
9. Wait 5 minutes
10. Spray the ceiling again
11. Wait 5 minutes
12. Scrape away. You might not even get down to the plaster (or drywall) at this step. If not, repeat 6-11 again
13. Have a beer
14. Call it a night and repeat 1-13 over again until you finish it

If you can get your entire ceiling down to the plaster/drywall without settling for an inbetween, mad props to you. For the first area, I went down to the plaster. Of course, I didn’t think of the obvious things I’d find doing so. Things like cracked plaster, bad patch jobs, etc. If I had a few weeks to work on this, I would have taken all of the texture down to the plaster. However, the painter is here to work on it today or tomorrow so I had to settle for what I could. 90% of the ceiling is just scraped down as much as I could without breaking through to the plaster. It will be heavily textured again, but only about 50% of what it was before. Ideal? No, but it will work for now and will look much better than previously (hopefully).

Still no pictures. Sorry. I take the pictures, but I tend to write these posts away from the camera and computer. I will do my best to get them up here soon.

I’m writing this from the prairie of North Dakota. Before the troubles with our new (old) home, we had planned a trip to Casey’s grandparent’s house in Bismarck, ND. That is where we are now, and have been since Tuesday evening. I won’t lie, it is a welcome relief from the constant roar of fans drying out our home.

My last post was posted the day after Christmas, the day we found out our home was more wet than the south coast after a hurricane. That was a day before we were supposed to pack our stuff up from Eden Prairie, MN and drive up. Most (sane) people would have decided to stay put for a while, or at least find another place to stay while the house dries out and is getting repaired. Of course, we were too excited to move into our place, we moved loaded the truck up on a rainy/icy Saturday and headed off to find out what shape the house was in.

Pulling up into the drive way, we see this:

As we walk around to the back door, we see this:

Comforting, right? Just the thing a first time home buyer wants to see.

Walking into the back door puts you on a landing on the stairs that head down to the basement. Directly in front of the door is a wall that has had wainscoting applied a few years ago. It didn’t look like this a month ago:

Taking a left brings you up a few steps to the kitchen. The water flowed in from the upstairs bathroom floor directly through the kitchen ceiling. This resulted in a nice hole:

Looking around quickly in the kitchen, you’d think the hole in the ceiling and a bit of pealing wallpaper were the only things damaged. Look a little closer you’d find the cabinet doors are all separating, and the stove top is rusting from getting rained on.

And another frustrating find was some door hardware we had just stripped the paint off of a few weeks ago:

However, a somewhat nice thing is all of our paint in the living room is falling off of the plaster, all 1/8″ to a 1/4″ of it:

We had been planning on sanding (meh) the paint off of the living room walls as it was extremely textured and simply much too thick. I’m hoping I can literally peel the paint off the entire room, saving the extremely dirty job of sanding it down. Granted this is a few months sooner than planned.

Going upstairs to the source of the entire problem, the bathroom. The day we received the call about this, we had Casey’s dad (who used to be a plumber) attempt to do a quick fix while everything was still wet. The upstairs bathroom had a washer and dryer hookup in it for a stackable, and it looked to be a reasonable candidate for breaking due to the dryer vent right next to it, possibly dropping the temp a few degrees lower than the rest of the room. So that wall was tore out and pipes were capped:

Sadly, when the water was turned back on, the waterfalls in the kitchen resumed. At that point, we figured any other plumbing fixes in that room would require much more time and destruction so he just turned the water to that room off. Problem solved? We thought so. So we turned the water back on and… no leaks. Yay! Upstairs there is also a small kitchen (which will be torn out once this is all fixed, but is rather convenient now). We had the water on for what must have been 6-8 hours and not a leak. Well, just as I was about to go to bed on Saturday, I was walking up the steps and felt something hit my head. Putting my hand on my head, I felt what I expected, water. Ugghh. There was a pin hole sized leak in the water lines running to the upstairs kitchen. Since this was now our main kitchen, we called up a plumber (since insurance will cover it) and he had to demolish some of the plaster (don’t cry, we were planning on flipping the stairs back to the original position, and this would have had to come out anyways) to find the leak. Well, after all that, the guy says he doesn’t carry any PVC plumbing parts (what???) and only installs PEX and copper. Weird.

Assuming I can find time tomorrow, I’ll post an update after the fans and dehumidifiers (hopefully) leave.