The Ceiling Issue

Sorry about the delay, but between wrapping up the school year, the holiday weekend and work I haven't had a lot of free time.

The last time I updated I told you about painting and The Ceiling Issue. We had gone around the house with a pad of post-it notes to mark spots that needed to be cleaned up. You can see them in several of the photos from the last entry. There were some spots that needed sanded down, some brush strokes above doorways, spots that had gotten dinged somewhere along the way. The painters came back in and touched up everything.

The closet guy also came in to fix the utility closet (in the little hall outside the master bedroom). We had requested that this one have half shelves and half hanging rod, but he had only installed the hanging rod. As a coat closet it would be perfect, but I want to use the space for brooms, vacuum, garbage bags, batteries, cleaning stuff. He came back and added three shelves and left another for us if we wanted to put it in either below or above the others. Right now I like having a larger space along the bottom, but it's nice to have the option. Sorry for the horrid picture, but because of the space it's impossible to get a good angle.

And now The Ceiling Issue. In a nutshell, you could see the drywall seams because the texture was different in those areas. Apparently the plaster absorbed into the mud faster than into the plain drywall. Kasey brought it to our attention, which I give him a lot of credit for, because neither B nor I noticed. This isn't the greatest picture, but you can see the seams. This was taken in full sun, which it when it looked the worst.

The first thing Kasey tried was sanding down the seams and painting the whole ceiling. It was better, but still too many visible. So the only thing to do was to sand down the entire ceiling and redo it. The whole process took two days. They covered everything up with plastic to minimize the mess, which I'm sure was considerable. I didn't even go to the house while they were working on it, but J said it looked like the scene from ET. If you have no idea what I'm talking about you need to go rent ET right now. I'll wait.

The night they finished I went in to look and almost cried, because EVERY seam was visible. Kasey talked me off the ledge and said to go back the next day when it had a chance to dry. I did, and it was a LOT better. Over the next few days it kept improving, and now there's only one spot that I notice, but I'm sure no one else ever would. It's like telling you to NOT think about an elephant, then that's all you can think about. That one spot is noticeable to me, but only because I know it's there. At any rate, we're happy with the way the ceiling looks now. None of my after pictures are very good, so I'll keep trying.

The whole ceiling thing took place over the last week 2 weeks of May. Over Memorial Day weekend we went to Ikea. Here's a preview of that action:

And finally, the boys driving the golf cart down the road. That wide open space and big, blue sky remind me why we live in the country.