Large popcorn..with extra butter, please.

That's how I like my popcorn, and the only place I want to see it is at the movie theater.  This house, however, has more popcorn than I can (almost) handle!  If you refer back to our hallway re-do when I removed the popcorn from the ceiling in two hallways, you'll know where I'm heading here. 

I haven't done much in the line of 'home improvement' here since the tiling work in the guest bathroom.  It was time to put some work clothes on and pick up a scraper.  There was a one foot wide strip of popcorn texture on the upper edge of the wall in our living room - only above the exterior/window wall.  What a bizarre thing to do!  That was the first to go, of this project.  Since it was a small area (1ft x 12 or so ft) I was able to scrape it one morning in just over an hour.  Easy peasy, right?  It actually was.  After the scraping it was just a 1/2 hour of patching mars in the surface before sanding the strip and then giving it two coats of primer.  Over all it was time well spent (as is most home improvement projects)!  I haven't tackled the living room ceiling yet, so you can see the contrast of the popcorn ceiling next to the newly finished (smooth) wall.  (An FYI!  IF you try this in your home, be sure and lightly spray the area you're working on with water.  That makes it easier to scrape and helps to reduce some of the airborne dust!)

The next part of the project was doing the guest room ceiling!  You'll notice, I'm working my way up to doing the largest areas of ceiling slowly.  This is something you really have to want to do.  This picture is a close up of how attractive this treatment is.  The second picture is of the hallway - while I was in the process of scraping it.  I didn't stop to take pictures of the guest room ceiling while I was in the process.  With a little starter help from our friend, Laurie (who had spent the night and helped me move furniture the next morning - as well as got started on the scraping while I patched the living room wall), I was able to get the ceiling in the entire room scraped in one day!  That's a lot of humming to ones self!  Once again, once the ceiling was completely scraped I was able to pull out the bucket of drywall mud and fill in any gouges, scrapes, dents, etc.  I let that dry for a couple of days before I then went back up on the ladder to sand the entire ceiling. 

Yesterday I primed and painted the ceiling...all the while uttering "oooh! aaah!"  The difference is so dramatic that it justifies the work!  There is still wall painting to be done - as you can see from the picture (working on getting the perfect color of pale blue -not quite there yet).  Once the walls are done then we can move on to that floor!  I'm not expecting to get this done in the next few days, but will be glad if I can finish up in here in January (holidays and work schedules get in the way some times). 

I have every hope that the guest room will turn out as nicely as the hallway did!  It's fun getting back into projects again....but all of this talk about popcorn has made me hungry.  Time to pop up a bag!