The Master Bedroom (so far)

Since we seem to be on the remodeling band wagon again, here's yet another post about our crazy shenanigans involving power tools and paint.

This was a tight fit.

As you know, we recently redid the master bathroom. If you missed all that craziness, you can read all about it here. We were so pleased with how that room looked that it made us heavily consider upgrading the adjoining master bedroom to kind of extend the awesomeness. To be honest, we had been thinking about it before the bathroom remodel but after we fell in love with that room it was time to act. After we moved in and demolished redid some of the other rooms in the house, we did get to the master bedroom. We painted the walls and I chose to paint the trim gray instead of white (it had been off white?) and add a "feature wall". We hadn't gotten to that whole popcorn finish removal thing on the ceilings so it stayed as did the crazy ceiling fan that threatened to kill us every summer when we turned it on.We started this party by cramming ALL
of our bedroom furniture into the master bathroom. I forgot how

The last complete before pic

Thin faux brick paneling

much I hated digging through the laundry basket like a rat in order to find clothes until this. Over the years, we've had several people ask us if the brick wall in our bedroom was real or not. The answer to that is "no", it was paneling. We really liked the brick for a while. It was different and gave sort of an urban loft like feel to the room that was very different from the rest of the house. We liked the kind of ice blue paint paired with the light gray trim, again very different than the rest of the house. It was sort of an oasis for a time, but that time had come and gone since we kinda started taking the house back to basics. So after the room was cleared out I started by taking down said paneling. I had forgotten what color the wall used to be, and also that there had been that crazy border in there. I was glad that we hadn't used more nails to secure this paneling to the wall because it came down fairly easily after I got the edge started. I would later come to hate all of the holes that I had to patch in preparation for paint, but it was all for the greater good.
Knowing what a super mess all of this was going to make, I took out a little insurance and bought some cheap plastic sheeting and covered everything that I didn't want to clean up later, including the doors and window. I was reading the Young House Love blog (I wanna be like them when I grow up) and they mentioned (just the other day in fact) that they were doing some painting and needed to contain the mess.

Tarp it instead of cleaning it!

That perfectly timed post led me to buy this crazy tarp zipper  thing seen in the picture --->
That thing was awesome! It was 110% worth the $10 that is cost. It totally kept the drywall dust and all that crap inside the room instead of letting it filter out into the rest of the house. If you have a super messy project like this that you're going to do, get you one of these bad boys! Ok, so skipping ahead a little you'll see that I got to the popcorn removal phase of this.I can't tell you how messy this is. I use the wet method of removal which means that I spray it with water using a garden sprayer to loosen it up and then I just scrape it all off back to the original drywall. This method is fairly fast, fairly easy, low dust, but again, it's wet. After I got all that mess down, we tag teamed sanding any residual stuff from the ceiling before using screws to suck the drywall back up to the ceiling and applying fresh mud to the holes, scratches, and taped joints. We have put screws in each time we have scraped a ceiling because back in the day they used nails and over time they kinda let things sag a little so we just go along side and put in screws and pound the nails tight again and move on. We're already going to be there mudding anyway, might as well do two dimples instead of one and get a better finish. Now let me insert a disclaimer here and say that we are not professional drywallers, but after the quote that I got of $500 to remove the popcorn (which took me about an hour) and $1500 to refinish it (we already had most of the stuff we needed) I don't think that it looks half bad for the $20 bag of mud and the few days it took. I'll be posting some after pics later so stay tuned. ~Kellie~