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Ugh.  I’m Officially. The. Worst. 

I’ve already changed my mind on the ceiling scraping project.  Three main reasons:

1.  THE MESS

2.  My crazily optimistic estimation of the scope of the project.

3.  My desire to stay married.

Allow me to elaborate…

1.  MESS - Kind of obvious… but even I (ha!) underestimated how bad it would be. I’ve already cleaned twice, and we’re still finding chunks of ceiling popcorn everywhere.  Like the top of the fridge.  (Ooops.  That may have been missed in the double cleaning.)  Under the microwave, all over the railings.  It’s literally everywhere.

2.  PROJECT SCOPE - Yesterday was cloudy, so it was like looking at the ceiling through a filter.  Today in the bright sunshine there were just way too many imperfections on my ‘smooth’ ceiling.  I think I’m too much of a perfectionist to be happy with it like that.  My Dad thinks we can sand the rough parts.  But seriously… scraping, then SANDING the whole ceiling???  Is WAY too much work for me.

3.  MARRIAGE - I don’t think Jeff we can live with the mess of scraping/sanding every room in the main floor of our house.  So we’re going to have to re-popcorn the part that I scraped.  What a sad, sad sentence to type.  Blerg.  I was bitching and moaning mentioning to Jeff that our house was going to have to stay stuck in the ‘80s forever because of the ceilings.  He reminded me that if I wanted prettier ceilings we could build a new house in a new neighbourhood, but we wouldn’t live on the park where we can watch our kids walk to school, or have a yard surrounded by mature trees with bunches of perennials that are beginning to bloom. 

 

OK, fine.  The ceiling stays.

Popcorn Popcorn Everywhere

So I started to do a minor ceiling repair this morning in my kitchen.  We needed to patch the area left by the old fluorescent light.  It turned into me scraping a little bit more, and a little bit more.  Until it was apparent that I was going to do the  Whole.  Freaking.  Ceiling. 

Ohmygoodness.  What did I get myself into!?!  The ceiling in my house has no starting and stopping point.  Every single room is connected.  So now I’m committed to doing the whole main floor. 

Scraping the ceiling is something I’ve always wanted to do, but thought it would be prohibitively difficult.  Turns out that, nope… it isn’t.  With a little bit of water, the stuff pretty much just slides right off.  But the mess!  The MESS!!!  That white dusty residue is everywhere.  Seriously.  Like piles of it. 

 

If anyone is considering scraping off their popcorn ceiling, I’d say totally go for it!  I’m already amazed by how much brighter and taller my ceilings seem! 

I’d recommend using one of these sprayers to make the job go way quicker.  (You can get them at the dollar store for $2.)  You pump it up, then it sprays continuously to soak a big area.  Then the popcorn stuff just falls away when you scrape it with drywall trowel.  Easy! 

 

In the picture on the right, you can see the line where a small section of the ceiling has been scraped.  Can you even believe how much whiter it looks than the popcorn part?  Craziness!  If you can handle the mess, the result is SO worth it!