No Salt or Butter on this Popcorn

My Coldwell Banker Realtor rocks. B is a friend of ours and also helped us buy our house. She is also handy with all things home improvement related, so when she offered to let me borrow some old paints to test out colors, I didn't refuse. When she said her mother could babysit so she could come over to help me remove the popcorn ceiling in J's room, I said, "I'll bring the wine!"

We spent about 3 hours taking turns with my wallpaper scraper. The popcorn scraping tool I purchased sucked and will soon be returned to Home Depot. Most people scrape their popcorn ceiling after spraying it, but we found it was easy just to scrape it dry and leave a little texture on the wall. Since I have never done this before, I figured I would just make J's room the experiment room. I'm sure it won't look perfect, but you've got to start somewhere.

The scraping only took about 2 hours. The next day I went back over and tried to smooth it out a bit. I bought a litle spray can of orange peel texture to fill in the spots that looked a little more deeply scraped than others. It sprays on blue but dries white. However, I also noticed that it pulled the drywall off as it dried (it left all these little holes.) So I decided that following directions and priming first might be a good idea.

Talk about a messy comedy of errors. I kept banging the extension pole into the walls. And kicking the paint tray. The ceiling was just sucking up primer like there was no tomorrow and because I was doing this at night with no glare from natural light, it was very difficult to see where I had primed and where I hadn't. I needed to go back and finish the next morning. I was a little disheartened by the slight appearance of imperfections that didn't seem to be there before I primed or in the artificial light. DH kept reminding me that this didn't have to be perfect, but it's been so long since I've had a project that was not child related, so I am a litle anxious to put my overachiever/perfectionist genes to good use again. I also decided to cut myself some slack. With this in mind I sprayed some more texture (which for the record dries off white to off green) and painted the ceiling. The texture didn't do too much for me. Either I didn't spray enough of it on (which is probably the case since I didn't see the point of adding texture after scraping so much away) or I didn't spray it evenly enough. All the same, I know that when we scrape the master bedroom I must take the extra step and sand the ceiling lightly first. This should make it easier to prime. I shouldn't have listened to the paint people who said, "Oh no! You can just go ahead and prime." Why is it the people who are supposed to know what they are talking about often don't?

Following the painting of the ceiling came the walls. They were much easier except for where the ceiling meets the wall. There were a few smudges that will need to be touched up, but overall it looks good. And then I painted the closet doors with blackboard paint so that J will always have a place to doodle. I had a chalkboard in my room from 1st grade through college. I always used it, so I wanted him to have something similar.

You'll have to wait for pics of the finished product. One more coat of blackboard paint. Oh and then we are having the house sprayed for fleas. What's that? We don't have a dog and we haven't moved in yet? Don't get me started.