Bit by Bit

As mentioned earlier, Pedro and I have been slowly addressing things that needed to be fixed in order to make my current home more attractive to a potential buyer. Today’s story is about Kellen’s room. It was the darkest and gloomiest room in the house and all three of us tried to make it brighter. I wish I had old photos of what it used to be, but my computer with all the old image files has been packed for the move and is already in storage.

Every time I live in a new house, I paint walls. I enjoy painting, and I like to have lots of colours around me. It’s an easy and relatively inexpensive way to freshen up a space and make it my own. My child, Kellen, has adopted the habit, probably because I allowed them to paint their own bedrooms in the growing up years. The last bedroom they painted before moving away to college was this one. They chose a rich, earthy green. For their bathroom, they painted it to match an old Disney Tomorrowland poster with bright blue walls and orange bubbles coming up. It looked great! But maybe not what a buyer would want.

A combination of factors make this room dark. Mainly it’s because a porch roof blocks much of the light from coming in the windows, and outside the porch roof are very tall trees that block most of the daylight remaining. Inside the room were popcorn ceilings that cast a billion tiny shadows. The dark green walls were the final straw. I purchased the brightest light I could get into the fixture, and it still only brought the level of light up from dim to dull.

We decided to fix the things we could control; namely, popcorn and paint.

Ceiling popcorn is somewhat easy to remove. Caution: popcorn often has asbestos in it, so if you do your own work, definitely mask up and ventilate the room to diminish the amount of asbestos particles you inhale. In our case, I knew the popcorn had been recently installed and when I remodeled the kitchen had it tested. There was no asbestos in it, so we only had to protect ourselves from breathing in dust – which is also not healthy.

{Aside: The man I bought the house from was delighted to tell me that he had done the ceilings himself. “Look!” he said with a big smile and pointed upward. “I put popcorn on all the ceilings. I always had it as a kid and I like it. I don’t know why no one does it anymore.” Kellen and I rolled our eyes inwardly and said sarcastically in our minds, “Great. Thanks.” I have been slowly trying to get rid of the popcorn, room by room ever since.}

I say “easy” and I mean, technically it takes little skill. But it is an extreme pain in the posterior, and I dread it. That’s why in 8 years of living here, I’m still not done. You take a spray bottle filled with water, spray the ceiling, wait a few minutes for the water to soak in, then take a spackle tool and scrape it off. Sheets of damp popcorn simply drop off the ceiling. The hardest thing is that you are bent over backwards, reaching up above yourself, and constantly getting crumbs in your face. Wear protective glasses! When you’re done, you’ve got a huge, nasty cleanup job ahead of you.

After removing the bulk of the popcorn, the ceiling was rough. My next job was to sand the entire ceiling, which was more backbreaking work, bending backward and working over my head, and trying not to breathe in dust.

Our next job was paint! I hit corners with white paint during the week. Then when the weekend came around, Pedro showed up and painted the ceiling while I continued to work on corners and small areas the roller couldn’t get into. By the end of the weekend, he had completed two coats of paint on the ceiling and I had taped and painted all the odd places.

Bonus! This room had been the previous owner’s room and he smoked indoors. I had been scrubbing walls and putting baking soda into the carpet and spraying air fresheners and leaving the windows open for weeks on end during the summers and after eight years the room still stunk. Guess what? After the ceiling paint dried, there is no smell in the room anymore. Apparently the porous popcorn ceiling was holding all the smoke smell. Good riddance.

The following week I began working on the walls. The green paint was so dark that it took three layers of white paint before it was totally obscured.

I painted and painted and painted and finally got these two rooms done. Gosh I was sick of white paint at that point.

Finally finally, I declared us done with the project. Kellen’s room and bathroom were unrecognizable. In a good way. It had never looked so good. I felt sorry that my kid’s bedroom could have been so much nicer if I had worked this hard on it long ago.