The guest room's secret

Bill took a week of vacation time to get the guest room finished. It's not quite there, but it's close. Very, very close. I am excited to share the pictures with you once it's complete.

Last week, we made our trip to the big box store to purchase supplies. While there, a nice employee asked if he could help us with anything? We were looking at scrapers for the ceiling so Bill told him that we're frustrated by how difficult scraping the ceiling has been and how "they" make it look so easy on tv. This employee told us the secret.

I'm not going to share it with you because I think more people need to know.

Popcorn ceilings over plaster are easily removed by spraying the ceiling with warm water.

That's what this man told us.

At first I was skeptical. Really? Some warm water in a spray bottle? It turns out it makes sense. The ceiling is likely a latex based  application; with plaster underneath that the latex will need to be loosened up a bit. Water will do the trick.

When we got home that day I found an empty spray bottle, filled it with warm water, and started spraying the ceiling. I let it sit for a few minutes (okay, really more like thirty seconds, I was impatient to see if this was really going to work) and started scraping.

The bad popcorn/textured ceiling scraped right off. Underneath was a beautiful, smooth plaster ceiling.

The longer I left the water to soak, the easier it scraped off of the ceiling.

Bill and I scraped the entire ceiling in four hours. Sure, there were a few cracks. It is plaster in an old house after all. However, Bill worked his magic on the cracks and got it primed and painted. The results are stunning! I cannot tell you how excited I am to have a smooth ceiling.

I only wish we had known that trick when we re-did the home office.

I wonder if we got lucky. Will the other room ceilings scrape off that easily?

Are we ready to tackle another room?

Not for a year or so. It will be our bedroom next, and that has wallpaper that has been painted over so it's going to be a process (on the walls and ceiling, yes and the ceiling has texture over the wallpaper).

In the meantime, I'll work on the hallway to get that finished (our built-in linen closet has been neglected, so it's time to knock that off the list).

But for now, we still have the finishing touches to work on in the guest room. Stay tuned!

Very little

Maybe this is why I don't normally blog on the weekends; I got nothin'.

It hasn't rained in weeks. Bill hasn't mowed the lawn since I was in Cincinnati.

We've kept my flowers alive, which I've shown you here.

I'm working on my running. The 5k is in one week. My goal is to run it in under 45 minutes.

We've been working on the guest room, scraping and scraping paint. There are three double hung windows in the room. Bill pulled off the sashes of the two that are ganged together and striped those. He'll pull the third one off, strip it, and then take them to the hardware store for new glass.

See? It's a little dry on the writing front.

I'm really enjoying my book, "Clara and Mr. Tiffany". I especially enjoy looking at the Tiffany window in our church. I know the book is fiction, but when the author talks about the glass detail, I have to assume she did her research. Or I'm just being a romantic. Either way, it's good.

That's about all that's happening here. I'm too lazy at the moment to get the cord and the camera and show you pictures from Hell. I promise I will. Just not today.

the window project

Here it is, the window project, a photo montage from beginning-ish to end-ish.

Here's a sample of what the windows looked like before (this is the set of double hung windows on the second floor).

Here's the casement window that has been under construction since last year. This is the beginning of the scraping. Yes, there is primer on there, that was removed. All of it was scraped off.

You can almost see that here. As I was priming. Did you know I'm forgetful? I almost forgot to take a picture of the window while it was naked, sans paint. Then I remembered and I snapped a picture halfway through priming.

Here they are all primed. Ready for paint...

And here's the final paint. The sill needs one more coat (it's a darker brown, think dark chocolate). We weren't too sure about the trim color at first. I think it's growing on me.