Nursery Progress
It might seem kind of strange that “progress” to us means that we now have an empty room. But, progress it is, since the room we designated the nursery until now has been the craft/office/storage/”attic staging area” room. But this week we (especially Kelly) worked hard at clearing it out so that we could get started on the demo (scraping the popcorn ceiling, window trim and ripping up the carpet).
Here are some pictures of the cleared out room, ready for demo:
Well, cleared out except for work tools and such...
Horrid icky carpet that has to go
The crib nook, bookshelves and closet
Door to the hallway, with the mother-to-be
The wall where the built in cabinets will go, eventually...
And this evening, as I was writing up this post, we had even more progress! Kelly got to work scraping the ceiling and it went a lot faster than he expected! All the bumps are gone and he says that he can’t see any cracks or seams on the ceiling, so he’s not sure why the popcorn was put up in the first place. (Hopefully, this bodes well for popcorn removal in pretty much all the other rooms in our house too…)
All he has to do now is give it a good sanding, then a skim coat of drywall mud
Of course, it made a huge mess in the room, but that’s just part of progress in any renovation, right?
November 12th, 2011 at 10:16 pm
Awesome! You guys are brave gettin’ rid of that popcorn ceiling. We left it.
November 14th, 2011 at 9:51 am
Wow! You sure have been busy. Looks like dusty work. Lol.
Tanya from dans-le-townhouse.blogspot.com
November 14th, 2011 at 10:55 am
Hey, so I am thinking about doing this in my house, but I have been told that it is VERY time consuming…. how long is this taking you? Have you done it before? Are you happy with the results?
thanks!!!
November 14th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Looks good!! I just popped over from YHL when I heard about some popcorn-ceiling removal! Kerrie, it depends on the kind of popcorn you have on the ceilings. When my husband and I moved into our first house last year, we scraped the stuff off of *all* the ceilings in our house. Haha. It varied wildly how hard it was to scrape the stuff off, I think because it was added at different times with different paste solutions. Scraping off our dining room ceiling (8×10′ room?) took me an entire back-breaking day of hacking away at it – but in our living room the stuff glided right off and we did the whole room (15×25′ ?) together in about four hours (not counting prep and cleanup – cleanup is the worst :p ).
To do it, you should probably have it tested for asbestos first. Then get a scraper from Lowes or Home Depot (it has a scrapy bit on top and holds a bag underneath to minimize the amount that falls on the floor) and a big spray bottle. The stuff comes off a lot easier when wet.
November 14th, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Ooh but I forgot to add, we were *thrilled* with the results of scraping it all off! Totally updated our house by 20 years. We had a few cracks that became exposed (our house is old too, 1920′s ish), but we just went over them with joint putty/caulking and paint. I learned from YHL this year how great it is to use caulking instead of putty – it seems to not-recrack better.
November 14th, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Thanks for responding to Kerrie’s question, Callie. I think it really depends on the “quality” of the popcorn (if you can say that popcorn is quality in and of itself…) My husband was surprised to find ours coming off fairly easily. It took him an hour to scrape off the ceiling of this room, which is 13′ by 15′.
He had thought that he would give the ceiling a good sanding before skimming on a layer of drywall mud, but he decided to skip that step, as he’d have to sand the drywall mud anyway at the end. He was able to get the skim coat up in a few hours the day after he sanded.
And yes, it makes a big mess. We’re taking up the carpets in this room anyway, and refinishing the hardwood floors, so we just left the mess on the carpet and will take everything up together, after we scrape the window trim and paint the walls…