How to: Remove Popcorn/Spackle Ceiling (DIY)

Hi friends!


I mentioned in the previous post that we removed the popcorn ceiling in order to brighten up our living room.
This is the real story of those harrowing 72 hours.

The problem with renovating is that when you complete one project that looks amazing, it brings out the glaring disparity between your awesome newly completed project and everything else that needs to be done. After we finished the floors and painted the walls this beautiful blue, the ugliness of the spackle ceiling just stared at me every time I looked at it. This is what started me on this journey.

Pretty walls, ugly ceiling



I'm not sure who convinced who, but the Sage and I decided to tackle this 400+ sq ft ceiling.  I had a week off from my summer program at work, and we decided this would be the perfect time. We could devote our undivided attention to this project. Little did we know, what we were getting in to. The Sage researched everything online, and then, I pretty much just followed his lead.

Materials you'll need:

water sprayer (we used this simply pesticide sprayer from Home Depot)

Plastic sheeting (we used this cheap lightweight sheeting) more on that later

Some sort of scraping tool (a putty knife works fine. We used a paint scraper)

Various sanding blocks

face masks

goggles/eyemask

A ladder

painter's tape

a good quality small,tapered paint brush  (ours was Purdy)

Paint roller with extender

paint tray

Ceiling paint (We used Ceiling White by Benjamin Moore)

Day 1:

1.Remove all furniture from the rooms you will be working in

2. Cover everything with plastic  (tape the plastic about 1/2 an inch below the ceiling onto the crown molding with painter's tape)

Make sure you tape down the entire seam where two pieces of plastic meet

3. Cover the floor with the plastic as well and tape it to the wall plastic. Seal it everywhere you can. If you have any holes, drywall dust will sneak through and get on your floor

4.Once everything is covered, take your sprayer and fill it with water. Spray a 6 foot section of the ceiling with the sprayer. Be generous with the water. You don't have to have it sopping wet, but if it's not wet enough, the ceiling will not scrape away easily.

Once we got started, I sprayed the ceiling while he came behind me and scraped.

5.Once you wet the ceiling, use your scraper (or chisel or any flat tool), scrape the popcorn away from the ceiling. At first, we tried to be clean and scrape it into that bucket. After about halfway through, we didn't care anymore. The stuff falls everywhere anyway. This part isn't hard and is pretty rewarding because you can ACTUALLY see the work you have done. If you look closely at the ceiling, you can actually see where the ceiling is wet, where he can scrape away. If he tried to scrape where the ceiling wasn't wet, he wouldn't be able to peel the ceiling away and would risk gouging the ceiling. The ceiling peels away easily, but you want to be gentle because if you gouge the dry wall, you'll have to fix it later.



The Sage doing the scraping





Ours tended to stick at the edges around the drywall



We continued the process until the entire ceiling was done.

In order to function, at the end of the day, I pinned the plastic up in various places, so we could get around. I pinned the plastic at the front door and in the kitchen around the kitchen sink and refrigerator and cabinets. It looked like this.

The whole ceiling looked like this at the end of the day.You can notice where it looks damp still. It's okay. That will dry.

End of Day 1

Day 2

1. Put on your face masks and eye masks.

2. If your AC is located in this room (like ours is) turn it off. If your AC is not located in this room, at least close the vents that lead into this room.

3. Look over the ceiling. Mark any spot that looks uneven or any place where the original contractor did not sand the original mudding. Look at the picture above. Notice the white areas, these are the areas you want to focus on. Run your hand over where the white meets with the tan colored areas. If it feels even a little uneven, sand it. Otherwise, this will show through when you paint it. You can use a sander with an extender or use a ladder with a sanding block. We did both.

4. Sand all of the spots you marked

This process took the two of us an entire day (15-18 hours). This was the hardest day for sure. You are covered in fine drywall grit, and the stuff gets EVERYWHERE (in your eyes, your hair, your nostrils)

Me after an exhausting day of sanding.

We pinned up the plastic sheeting again at the end of the day like we did day 1.

Day 3:

This would have been the easiest day if we weren't so spent and exhausted from the previous 2 days.

1. Sand any leftover areas (we had to sand the large patch where the old light used to be in the morning because it wasn't dry when we finished the night before)

2.Have someone (me!) take the tapered brush and cut in the walls.(This means paint the area very carefully close to the crown molding. Paint out far enough for the roller to paint this area without risking bumping into and accidentally painting the crown molding. Once I had cut in a section of the wall, The Sage came behind and began painting the ceiling with a roller.

3. After you've painted the entire ceiling, take a break (we went out to eat) and let the paint dry.

4. Come back and put on another coat of ceiling paint.

5. If you'd like, you can put on another coat and repeat steps 3 and 4. At this point, we were so tired and ready to be done that we only did 2 coats.

6. Clean the entire mess.

7. Put your room back together and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

We finished the painting around 2 am. I wanted my living room back so much that we pulled an all-nighter and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and put our living room back together. We finished around 6 am, but we were so proud and glad to be done.

Now for the practical part:

Would I do this again if I knew what I was getting into?

     Maybe. We are planning on doing it again to two smaller rooms, but those spaces are much smaller and are not our main living psaces.

What would I do differently if I had to do it again?

NUMBER 1!!!!!  I would get heavy plastic sheeting or paper for the floor. The thin plastic stuff kept tearing and all kinds of stuff got through onto our floors...which is what made clean up take forever. It is fine for the walls, but not even close to strong enough for the floors. We made little holes in it just moving the ladder around.

2. At the beginning, we would cut holes in the plastic sheeting around the windows and tape them to the frame, so you could open the windows and let the moisture out of the room since you can't really run your AC while doing this.

3. We would have bought an adjustable paint extender to get around cabinets and tough spots.

4. If you have the opportunity, stay somewhere else while you're working on this! If you can, crash with your inlaws or a friend for a day or two. That will cut down on the frustration of living in a workzone. Part of the reason that we felt like we HAD to be done was because we really wanted to use our kitchen again and were tired of fast food.

5.If you know that you are going to have to do a few major patches of drywall work (like we did where he moved the light), do all of that before you stage the whole house and start the process. We wasted a looooooooong time waiting for large drywall patches to dry in a humid house before we could sand them and move on.

There you have it! We did it. It was worth it, but it was definitely a beast to accomplish.

UPDATE! 7/2/2013

I forgot to note two important things!  First, I forgot to shout out to The Sage's best friend (who used to be a contractor) for helping us patch the big hole where the old light fixture used to be. He also spent a grueling 5 hours sanding with us on Day #2! Thanks Peter! 2nd, he read this blog and reminded me to mention this. If you are renovating a house before you move into it, it is always smarter to work from the top down. So, first you fix the ceiling, then do the walls, and then do the floors, if you are able. Since The Sage and I like to do everything backwards, we did the floor first, then the walls, and then the ceiling! :) Happy renovating!

Brighten a dark space

Hi all,

I haven't been on in forever because we were hard at work on some major projects. 

Our tiny (one bedroom, one bath) condo home had a couple of issues after we moved in. One of the most difficult was our dark living room. It has windows, but outside we are surrounded by trees. It also had one puny track light that did not give light to the entire room.

Below is the only before pic I have from the very beginning. This was before we even moved in while we getting the house move-in ready. Notice the mint green washed-out walls and concrete floor. Also, that's the Sage husband leaning over the counter.

I call him The Sage because A) he seems to know everything and can do almost anything B) I'm not sure I've ever seen him do something truly stupid (unlike me, who does stupid stuff pretty much every waking moment of my life. For some reason, it never seems stupid until after I do it. C) He's just wise, man!

We spent most of our time in this room, so we needed to make it brighter. We did several things to help solve the lighting problem. Before we moved in, we installedthese beautiful high gloss laminate floors. These reflected light and helped brighten the space some. However, it just wasn't enough. (notice the puny little light in the right corner)

I started to do some research and found this awesome post by Brittany Bailey over at www.prettyhandygirl.com.  She talked about brightening up a dark space.

One of the things she did was paint the walls. B and I did some research and chose a lovely ice blue. We had heard that you needed light walls to have a bright space. The walls were currently a very light mint green. We painted our light blue on a piece of cardboard and put it up in our living room to look at it in fake light at night and in natural light in the daytime. I loved the light blue in the light, but hated it at night.

We went back to the drawing board. I had actually read somewhere (now I don't remember where) that putting a darker color on your walls actually warms your walls and adds its own light to your room, so we decided on a darker blue than the ice blue that I had originally chosen. We did the same process, and I loved that blue in natural and fake light.  Doesn't it look great and brighten the space?



We loved the new blue and the new room. However, it was still too dark and the popcorn ceiling was UGLY!!! Now that my walls were so pretty and blue, I hated to look at the ceiling. Plus, we knew this light fixture wasn't going to work. It was positioned almost all the way to the right in the front of the fireplace and the fixture didn't give off enough light.

Luckily, the Sage husband can do electrical work. He told me that all I needed to do was pick a new fixture and he'd move the light and the new fixture to the center of the room for me. However, there really was no point in doing that until we removed the spackled, popcorn ceiling.

We knew this would be a major undertaking. To be honest, if I had known how much work it would be, I probably wouldn't have started the project.

Either way, we wanted a brighter room. The post above from Britanny talks about how much popcorn ceilings darken a room. After we looked at it, we could tell why. The uneven surface of the ceiling creates little shadows all across the ceiling and instead of reflecting light. It sucks away light.

We decided to take on the popcorn ceiling. It took 3 full days. (We worked about 15 hour days each day with just the two of us.) We covered about 400 sq ft because unfortunately our foyer, kitchen, dining room, and living room ceilings were all connected and had to be done at the same time. After 72 hours of living in a house that would make Dexter squeal with delight, we finished the process. It is filthy and exhausting to live like the pictures below for 3 days.

However, we did finish it. To be honest, it didn't take a rocket scientist, just a lot of elbow grease and patience. Anyway, it was totally worth it.

The ceiling process will be documented more thoroughly in my next post. This is the gist.

Day 1: Cover everything in plastic, Remove spackle from ceiling, using water and a scraping tool

Day 2: Sand the imperfections, mud major holes, sand again

Day 3: Sand again, paint the ceiling (used Ceiling White by Benjamin Moore)

After we finished the ceiling, The Sage put in my light. It was so exciting! The room looked so fantastic.

Here is a recap on what we did to brighten the space:

1. Added high gloss floors

2. Painted the walls a darker, warmer color

3. Moved puny, 2 light track light away from the fireplace to the center of the room and changed the fixture

4. Removed popcorn ceiling and painted ceiling

Look at the results! They speak for themselves.

Cheap and Effective way to clean your stainless steel appliance

Things you'll need:

Barkeeper's Friend

WD40

soft sponge

paper towels

Howdy folks,

Well, as we began furnishing our little condo foreclosure, we realized that all of the appliances were seriously old. I mean 1980s, and not cute vintage appliances either. Strange, knobby behemoths. See evidence below.

This was the microwave. It was so sketchy, we didn't keep it around long for fear that we might some how get radiation poisoning.

Replacing the appliances was our first order of business. We bought a great cheap stainless steel fridge off of Craig's list. Unfortunately, it had some kind of rust stains on it that we couldn't figure out how to get out.

After some research, we found a post somewhere that talked about using Barkeeper's Friend and WD40. So, we tested it out.

First, I wet a SOFT sponge and poured a generous amount of  Barkeeper's Friend on the sponge. Then, using an up and down motion only, I wiped it on the refrigerator. (Please don't mind the SARS mask. B was sawing in the kitchen, and there was sawdust EVERYWHERe. More on that later).

Notice the up and down motion and soft side of the sponge. (you can rub hard as long as the sponge is soft.)

Then, wipe down the fridge with a wet towel.

The change was AMAZING. To seal it, spray a soft towel with WD 40, and wipe up and down. The fridge now looks brand new.

Perfecto! 

Sidenote: I can no longer tape pictures to the front because the WD40 makes the surface slick.