Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Ceilings...

kiOk!  Ceilings!

We decided a loooooooooong time ago something HAD to be done about the kitchen ceiling.

Why?

Let me show you.

Because of nasty icky interesting stuff like that.

Our ceiling is sooooooooooo old and yup...it's still lath and plaster.  Now we were 100% willing to tackle walls but tearing out a ceiling...?  Um, not so much.  The biggest thing we found about lath and plaster is that the stuff multiplies when it hits the ground.  A lot.  Like in Harry Potter when the horcrux duplicated by touching it...? (wow...totally just showed what a book nerd I am)  That was what happened with our lath and plaster.  We thought that just knocking down a little wall wouldn't be so hard.  About 5 (no exaggeration) huge green take-out to the curb garbage cans later...we are STILL cleaning up the durned stuff.

Told you.  The stuff multiplies.

Anywhoo...  Tearing out the ceiling?  Not an option.  Not to mention all the insulation that would come pouring onto our heads from the attic.


See the gray and slightly orange stuff?  Yup...that's insulation.  And there's over a foot of it everywhere up there.

SO!  What to do...  The answer came in the form of paneling.  Not beadboard...but the wider stuff.

After 2 hours a couple nights ago and an hour or so yesterday...check out how much better it looks.



Now obviously this is before any caulk or paint has been added...I just wanted to throw up an in-progress picture.

About caulk.  The Hubs bought some caulk that was in the white section and didn't check the bottle.  He pulled them out tonight and totally not white.  Uh-uh...it's clear.  He had to run back to the store and exchange it.  Booo.  So rule of thumb...always check the bottle.

One thing we definitely ran into was the room not being square.  Check this out...


See how it's right up against the wall in the corner...?  Yeah, look how far away it is now.  And that was perfectly leveled and everything.  Oy.  Good thing we have cabinets going in that can help distract from that.  Oh the joys of renovating older homes.  Has anyone else run into this issue?  What did you do about it?  We're genuinely interested!

Another issue we ran into is our sheets sometimes didn't perfectly line up.  They claim to be the same but some have slight differences...we're hoping caulk will help to hide that.  We'll let you know.

We ended up using 32"x48" sheets of paneling and I can't imagine how anyone could use the 4'x8' sheets without some serious man power helping out.  Over the head work is hard!  At least it is for me...I have no upper body strength I swear.

OH!  And for those of you who were interested in the Lantern tile (which I still can't get...*tear*) Overstock will have it back in stock the 2nd week in Feb...I was just emailed about it today.  It's a significant discount from Home Depot (again...not any kind of endorsement).

4 comments:

Breanna said...

Your Harry Potter comment made me so happy! I find that Harry Potter relates to everything. People even use him in their talks at church. :)

Ian Anderson said...

Square rooms lol, rare animal that!

One thing you can do sometimes is split the difference and taper both edges of the room equally. Needs careful measurements though. Most times people don't realise that the room is out of square until they get to the other side :-0

Otherwise, just put the tapered side down the least seen side.

Re; working overhead, did you make up a couple of 'dead men'? Kind of a long bodied "T" in 2 by 2 that you push under the board once it is up there.

This frees up your hands to juggle the board into place and fix it.

You are so right about the dust taking them out, I wrote about some I have done this week on my blog too!
Stay well
Ian
---------------------------------
Most days you can find me pottering about at polishing peanuts, where I try to find sense in an often bewildering world.

Ian Anderson said...

Sorry, link didnt seem to show

I'll try again!

Dead man prop

I'll get the hang of this one of these days :-)
Cheers

Ellie Cutler said...

Oh my! Ian...that's link is awesome! We're going to do the same thing in our front room and we're totally doing that. Thank you for sharing!