Removing textured ceilings

Our specific variety of textured ceiling has a few names: crows feet, stomp texture, slap brush, and panda paw.  Don't those all sound exciting and fun?  THEY'RE NOT!!!

We have ceilings like this all over our home.  The texture is so dimensional that we jokingly call them stalactites.

Mostly I hate them because they collect dust and create shadows on the ceiling.  See how dark the ceiling looks in that first photo?

Everyone we talked to said they're very hard to remove completely (they're applied differently than popcorn), and thus it's quite expensive to have it done.  We don't hate them enough to throw thousands of dollars into making them disappear, so we thought we'd try something cheaper first.

How about just sanding them a little?

Armed with lots of protective gear (glasses and mask are a must!), we just wrapped sand paper around a sanding block and went at it.  The stalactites broke off easily, and the smaller mountains sanded down without too much more elbow grease.

It took a little over an hour to do this 10' x 9' room in our house.  Cleanup was another half an hour, because this process creates a LOT of dust (be sure to open the windows, close the vents, and shut off the AC).  This project was super cheap - just the cost of a pack of sandpaper.

Here's a closeup of what it's like after sanding.  It's not totally smooth (that costs big bucks), but it's a huge improvement!

Here's the room half finished.  The left side has been sanded already.

Doesn't the ceiling look so much better?  Cleaner, brighter, more welcoming.  Such a difference!

Let's compare to the "before" again:

Now I have the itch to do the rest of the house...

Be careful, because it will make quite a mess!

Bonnie Projects

One last reason why I hate wallpaper

Oh wallpaper, how I loathe thee.

First, you're hideous
Then, you firmly stick to the wall, coming off only in minute pieces of confetti
Next you must be scrubbed to remove traces of glue
And finally, your glue is never really gone, so you must be covered in oil-based primer


I talked to a handful of experts, and it turns out that even though I scrubbed the heck out of the walls to get all the wallpaper glue off, it's still a good idea to prime before you paint.

Wallpaper glue can become reactivated by water-based paints like the usual latex you'd use on walls, and cause bubbling and peeling and all sorts of mess I don't want to deal with.

Priming the walls with an oil-based primer seals in the glue and saves the day.  But nobody warns you that it smells horrible.

I bought the "odorless" oil-based primer Sherwin Williams offers, and went to town.  Coverage was OK, I suppose, but the smell was AWFUL!!!  Odorless, my foot!  We aired out the room for days and it still lingers.  Bleh.  Hopefully the normal latex wall paint will seal in the odor?

Anyways, now it's done and ready for pretty, zero-VOC paint.  Thankfully it'll be a while before we're hosting guests in here, so it'll have plenty of time to air out.

Baseboards and Crown Molding

We've been busy in the guest room!  We removed the dinky baseboards and yucky carpet and got to a clean slate.

I won't give a play-by play of how we did the baseboards and crown, because I'm sure we didn't take the easiest or correct route, but I will give a few tips and some before-and-after shots.

Since we're getting new carpet, the question arose of whether to put up baseboards before or after the carpet.  Googling basically gave the answer of either, but it's a better idea to do the baseboards first.  I also figured I could be messy while painting them, and not have to worry about painting the around carpet fuzz.

We also discovered that the floors sag almost an inch in places.  Not enough to notice while walking around, but how do you place a straight board on that?  Turns out carpet will puff up to take up the space, so it's more important to be sure there's enough room everywhere to jam the carpet under the baseboards.

Those questions answered, we got to work!  The cuts were pretty easy, and the nail gun the neighbors lent us (thanks guys!) was a dream.

Then we moved on to the crown.  I bought a Kreg Crown-Pro Crown Molding Tool to help us manage the crazy angles.  It did the job, but it holds the wood in such a way that our 10" saw wouldn't make the whole cut.  Tommy's grandpa came to our rescue though, and lent us his 12" saw.

After that hiccup, cutting the wood was fairly straightforward.  The Kreg Crown-Pro came with a handy booklet that walked us through the process, and we never even made a wrong cut!

When we went to hang everything, some of the corners weren't amazing, but caulk filled them up OK and you can't tell anymore.

One tip for hanging - we made little pieces to match up in the corners with the piece we were hanging.  These helped us get the angles right and ensure all the pieces were going to fit together OK.

For the little guys that finished off the crown near the closet, we attached them to the longer piece with wood glue, let them dry overnight, and then nailed the long piece to the wall.

Tommy caulked all the cracks, and filled the nail holes with spackle.

Now it's time to get a final coat of paint on everything!

Making progress!

Guest Room Update: Wallpaper is Gone!

When I received Jackie's ideas for the new rooms on Saturday, it sent me into serious DIY mode.  Tommy was out of town on a bachelor party (see their flowers next week!), so I buckled down and got to work.

The worst thing about the guest room was the wallpaper.  The craziest part is that the previous owner was an interior decorator!!

I mean this very seriously.  If we ever buy another house with wallpaper in it, I am making it a contingency of the sale that it ALL must be completely gone by the time we close.

We emptied the room and got to scraping.

Tommy did a ton of the work while I was on a business trip.  Altogether it probably took us 20+ hours to get all that ugly off the walls.

My final recommendation on removing wallpaper?

1. Get a damp sponge and sponge over the area.  
2. Wait a few minutes.
3. Scrape and peel anything you can.
4. Repeat
5. Bonus: have a binge viewing marathon of a show your spouse hates.

I had two sections going at once so the water could be soaking into one area while I scraping away somewhere else.

You know what didn't work at all?  That wallpaper removal spray and our garment steamer.

Finally, FINALLY it was all down.  I gave the walls another once-over with a giant car wash sponge to get off any remaining glue and paper bits.

Tommy was pretty happy when he got home from his trip, though he did say something along the lines of, "Now how am I going to get away with watching six episodes of Prison Break in a row?"

Unfortunately, the walls aren't in great shape.  Aside from being a disgusting flesh color, there's a fair amount of drywall work in our future, so stay tuned!

Bonnie Projects

A First Time For Everything

Y'all aren't going to believe me.

I hired a decorator...

You still there?  Good, because I can't wait to tell you about her!

First, why did I hire a decorator?  We have a few rooms in our house that have completely perplexed me.  They're ugly, dysfunctional, and difficult to decorate.  I'm talking about our dining room, guest room, and basement.

The basement is a true mess, so we're saving that for later.

The dining room is tough because it's small, dark, connects a bunch of other spaces, and gets abused as both a place to eat and a place to work.  We'd probably find a bunch of other things to do in there if we didn't hate being in the room.  It's a mess.

I took a photo as-is because it shows how it's just not working for us.  Stuff piled everywhere, computers in the way, uck.

The guest room is tough, too.  Eventually we hope this room will become the nursery, so we don't want to invest in anything that won't have a life there or somewhere else in our house after a baby.  I've also been unable to see past the wretched wallpaper in there.

It's small, too, and we can't put anything but a queen bed in there.  Guests have no room to walk and nowhere to put a suitcase.  It's highly uninviting.

So with all those challenges, I was stumped!

Meanwhile, I've discovered Jackie through her blog Teal & Lime.  Since I started following her, she's quit her day job and started an interior design service, Teal & Lime Interiors.  What's cool is that she never even comes to my house - it's all done digitally!  This helps her keeps costs low - she provides the design, ideas, and a shopping list, and the client buys and installs everything themselves.

Besides all that, I LOVE her work.  Her house is amazing, and I am constantly inspired by her mood boards and projects.

Affordable, beautiful style that I can implement myself?  Sign me up!

We hired Jackie to make two custom mood boards for us - one for the dining room and one for the guest room.  This past weekend, she sent me the completed designs.  You better believe I spent the next hours of my life poring over them and starting to buy the stuff!

Today I'll share our before pics and her designs.  Over the next weeks (maybe months), I'll share how we go about implementing her design.

So far, we're loving the process, and highly recommend Jackie.  If you're interested in her services, tell her I sent you!  She had a lot of fun working on our rooms.


Without further ado...

Dining Room: Small, dark, messy, and the center of our house.  The only things I like are the built-in cabinets (yay storage) and the chandelier we installed last fall.  Keeping it real here, don't judge!

Here's Jackie's solution for the room.  She based it on my idea of hanging a family photo from our wedding week at the head of the table.  Everyone is wearing coral and navy, so she incorporated those colors in her design.  I also ordered most of the stuff for this room, and I can't wait to set it up!

Guest Room: Small, dark, awful wallpaper, uninviting.  The lake view from the room is about the only thing going for it.  Again, keeping it very real here, so don't judge!!!

Again, Jackie came through with an awesome design!  She drew inspiration from the shirt stripes quilt I made from Tommy's dress shirts.  We're still fixing the walls in here, so I haven't made as much ordering progress, but I'm super excited to get started.

What do you think?  Am I crazy to hire a designer?  Do you think her designs will work for us?

Bonnie Projects