My Aching Muscles: Renovation Week Two
How is it the end of week two? Seriously...what?! I guess time really flies when you are working yourself ragged to finish a home remodel. My body is certainly starting to feel it too. I am an aching lump of sore muscles today for the first time during this whole project. As I write, I am wrapped up in this godsend of a heating pad that is shaped to fit around your neck and shoulders. If you are like me and have never seen something so wonderful, look it up and buy one; you will be so happy. I could barely roll out of bed this morning after the grueling day of ceiling work and dust clean up we had yesterday. Thankfully, we took today off to recuperate (I have Adam's reasonable thinking to thank for that decision).
Week two totally made the fun, paint-filled first week seem like a breeze in comparison as we moved out of the bedrooms and into the living room, which has so many more obstacles like wood paneling, old ceilings and sad sad crown moldings. We started off the week by removing the popcorn from the ceilings in the living room, hallway, and bathroom. This actually was way easier than we had even hoped. Before we tackled the project, I was acting super Hermione Granger sure of myself because I had read a whole two DIY blog posts on the subject and it seemed easy enough, but secretly I was really worried it would be terrible and we would completely mess something up. But we didn't! We used one of those weed killer pump sprayers to finely mist water on a small section of ceiling, let it set in for about five minutes, and then just scraped the popcorn right off using a plastic straight edge tool. So easy!! What a mess though; if you ever do something like this, definitely make sure to put down a plastic drop that can be rolled up and thrown out.
Once the popcorn was gone, there were a few areas that needed some patching with joint compound. This is also a surprisingly easy task, and by this point, I am kind of a genius drywall-patcher. It was then my brilliant idea that since the compounded areas needed to be sanded and would look slightly different than the rest of the ceiling (which still had some leftover texture from the popcorn) we should sand the whole ceiling! I am pretty sure Adam thought I was insane, but being the kind man that he is, he fully supported my craziness. Me being the crazy person that I am, I pushed through any fatigue I may have felt and sanded the entire ceiling myself in pretty much one go; thus my aching muscles today. My thought though is that any amount soreness is totally worth it if our home looks that much better. I may be a little too much of a perfectionist.
In between ceiling projects (and with the help from some wonderful family members - thank you Erin and Sandy), we repaired and painted the bedroom closet, sanded and painted the bathroom door, and sanded the wood paneled living room walls, windows and mouldings. You know something, sanding creates a LOT of dust, and dust is a bitch to clean up. I am pretty sure most of the terrible muscle pain in my sides is from all of the sweeping. We finally cleared most of it out though and washed the walls so we could start filling in the cracks and gaps in the wood paneling. The corners of the living room are the worst because I decided I didn't like the old corner moldings and tore them down, which then revealed inch-wide gaps showing straight through to the outer concrete walls. I think filling it in with caulk will be a fine solution. Keep in mind that we don't have a ton of money to put into this project, and we really don't know what the hell we are doing, so many of our "fixes" are a little bit more like bandaids. For example, our crown moldings; they are old and don't match up perfectly, and there are kind of large gaps in sections of the wall. We tried tearing them down, but the scariness we found lying beneath was too much to handle this go around. Maybe we will tackle that project next year; a good sanding job, a bunch of caulk, and a fresh coat of paint will do just fine for now. We have plenty else going on at the moment, and I think I can push aside my perfectionist tendencies for now to save a few hundred bucks.
All in all, everything is really coming together nicely, and once we can get our flooring put down in our bedroom we can start moving in!! I am getting antsy to get my workroom set up and start crafting again. My yarn and beads are calling to me from deep within the stack of boxes in the corner. I cannot wait to get them unpacked and and get back to work! Maybe, just maybe we can truly call this place home in just one more week.