Don't Look Up!

Up next in the living room was prepping of the ceiling. I really, really dreaded working on the ceiling. I put it off for days and spent inordinate amount of time googling how to do it. Why worry about the ceiling? Why not just prime and paint?

Living Room Before: this is the paint and the Prior's furniture. bleh

Living Room Before: this is the paint and the Prior's furniture. bleh

Living Room Before: this is the paint and the Prior's furniture. bleh

Well, like a lot of our house projects, we mostly are fixing the awful DIY attempts by the previous owners (We'll call them "the Priors"). The living room ceiling was one of the worst offenders in the house. The Priors had globbed on the dark puke mint paint and must have done it in the dark late at night. There were whole sections of ceiling missing paint, showing the white primer through the puke. Most of the surface was bumpy, with runny paint stalactites. Other sections were veined with plaster cracks, some feebly ‘fixed’ with smooth spackle juxtaposed with the geologic paint features.

In short, the ceiling needed work. We were planning to paint it a light, off-white color which would inevitably highlight the flaws (actually, it’s the same color we used in the kitchen). My parents had recently skip-trowel plastered their kitchen walls and ceiling, achieving a beautiful, textured, old-world style stucco look. My dad tinted the plaster mix with paint colorant and the project took him weeks to finish. Literally, weeks…

I liked the look and knew it would hide the ceiling flaws, but I only had two days to do the project. Then I came across a slightly different method on the DIY Diva Blog that used a thin coat of pre-mixed joint compound, spread and “skip-troweled” with a 10 or 12 inch mud knife. I convinced my beautiful wife that this would be a great solution to fixing our ceiling. She agreed. However, I doubted my skills and was anxious that I would screw up the ceiling even worse.

Up next, I’ll show you what happened...