How did paint even get there?

You know when you get back from the beach and somehow you always find sand in the oddest or smallest of places?  Well that's what happened to us this weekend, but instead of sand, it was paint.  I guess that'll happen when you paint all the ceilings and walls in the dining room/living room.  So here's the ceiling, after we'd taken down the popcorn ceiling and exposed all the dry wall. At this time, the walls have not been painted yet either.

  

Then we started painting everything with primer and learned that dry wall drinks up paint.  Luckily the walls just needed a quick rolling over but the ceiling....we ended up putting on three coats of paint.  This was partly due to the fact that the dry wall took a lot of paint but also because we were hoping to leave the ceilings flat and not add any texture. Here you can see the partly painted ceiling and the corner that still has some dry wall exposed.

I forgot to mention that the painting part was not so bad.  Jon used the rolling brush on the ceiling and some of the walls, while I used a little brush to paint around all the trim that goes around the floor and the seam between the wall and the ceiling.  Also since we were priming everything, we didn't have to be too careful with our corners because everything is white.  If I finished the small details in the area we were painting, I would pick up our other roller to help things along.  That didn't happen too often though.  The part that was awful was the sanding which took place before the painting.  We used a screen sander with a very small grit to sand the entire ceiling.  This was done to help us achieve a smooth ceiling and it sucked!  It was so hard to do and my lack of coordination made it difficult for me to do it with my left arm when my right arm was tired.  So this handsome man did 95% of it.

I spent the whole time trying not to laugh at him because he looked like a hipster.  He had on some old school racket ball glasses, he was wearing a bandanna, he had his pants rolled up and he wasn't wearing socks with his Vans!  Oh but bless his heart for tackling the nasty and difficult sanding.

In an attempt to make the ceiling and walls look as best as they can, we spent the majority of this long weekend painting.  My mom flew in on Wednesday night and we enjoyed a relaxing Thanksgiving Day which ended with a fab dinner at Hector's.  My mom left early on Friday morning and then we got to work.  But by this afternoon we were left with this....

Yes, that includes a fully de-popcorned and painted ceiling as well as freshly painted walls!  VICTORY for the Mooneyhams.  I still need to get a full shot of the living room but thought that I'd include one when we have the living room all put together.

Up next on the To Do List is the master bedroom which needs to be sanded and then painted.  Until then we are camping out in the bonus room until the master looks as amazing as the living room/dining room.

Our very first Home Improvement Project

(This picture was taken while the sellers were still living here)

Do you see that?  Up, up, up....on the ceiling!!!  That dear readers is the dreaded popcorn ceiling texture that was popular in the 50's, 60', 70's, and even the 80's (when our fair house was built, 1986 to be exact).  Not only is that stuff unsightly, but up until 1978 it usually contained asbestos.  Since our house was built nearly a decade after the ban we weren't concerned with the possibility of asbestos, but we were unexcited about the way it aged our home.

Long before we bought this home, we realized that it was very likely that we would be de-popcorning the ceilings of our first home.  It was very popular for decades and well we weren't in the market for a brand new home.  (Side Note: most new builds have more inspection items that need to be addressed than older homes.)  So long ago we started researching how to remove this ugly stuff and we found out that in most cases it is relatively easy to remove if 1. it does not contain asbestos and 2. if it has not been painted over in the past.  We were lucky because we didn't have asbestos and it had never been painted over, which is also why ours looked even more dingy.

In order to remove the texture one simply has to wet an area of the ceiling with either a spray bottle or in our case a pressure sprayer filled with water, give it a few seconds to soak and then use a putty knife (we used a 4 inch one) to scrape it off.  It slides off like butter on hot toast and you are left with exposed drywall!  If and when we felt a little resistance we simply wetted it down a bit more, waited a second and then scraped again.  We found that the drywall seams needed the most soaking, as well as, along the edge of the walls where there is a bit of tape.  Are you ready to see a picture?  Here goes...


Ahh, look at how smooth that is.  And surprisingly the exposed dry wall offers more lighting in room than the texture did.

Here's what the floor looked like.

We found the paper was creating more of a mess than it was preventing so we pulled out a tarp and then threw it and the popcorn goo from the ceiling out.  And yes the carpet is pink...but that's a project for another day.

We managed to the get living room/dining room in two nights which really helped us devise a good plan of attack.  The next night it took the two of us about an hour to do that mater bedroom including clean up.  I forgot to mention but a nice wet/dry shop vac, while not essential, makes the clean up process so much easier. We just sucked up anything that fell on the floor and then we were all cleaned up.

Here's the master...

We have no overhead light in our room so we had to get creative with our mirrored closet doors and angled in light from the bathroom and hallway.

We managed to get my office done yesterday during the day and all we're left with is the guest room and the hallway which we hope to get done in the next few days.  Our next project is to make sure the ceilings are uniformly smooth by using a screen sander on the exposed dry wall.  We're thinking for now that we don't want to add any texture to the ceilings, so after sanding we will paint.  We've decided to just white wash everything with primer and then once we are all moved in we can start making some more serious color decisions.

My office/craft room.

Stayed tuned as we continue to update the house and we will do our best to document what we're doing.  Ohh and some day I'll use my real camera instead of just my phone, but until then you'll just have to deal with a lower quality pictures.

House, house we've got a house!

We're back to blogging and the reason we took such a hiatus was that after we were outbid on the first home, we decided to keep to ourselves about the process. Originally, we thought it would be nice to have a space to talk about the ups and downs but when you're in a down moment, it's hard to write about it and remain positive.

Here's a quick recap to explain what happened between the end of September and now.

- After we decided to raise our price point we found a great little gem of a house in North Kirkland.  It was a short sale but we feel in love anyway, we put in an offer, end up in a second mutli-bid, lost to the other couple and then felt really down on our luck. Then we looked at house after house and none of them were right.

- Our FR told us not to be discouraged so we headed out for another full Saturday of house searching and still nothing!  The next day, Sunday we noticed that a house in the same neighborhood had just been listed for sale and we asked our FR to take us out there the same day.

- When we got to the house, we were picking up some good vibrations and as soon as we looked around, we knew that this was the place we wanted to make our home!  But just to make sure we weren't jumping the gun, we went home, thought about and then let our FR know we wanted to put in an offer right away.

- After some of the normal back and forth between buyer and seller, we came to mutual acceptance and before we knew it we were getting the inspection done, getting our finances approved and leaving work early to sign papers at the Escrow office!

- And then on Sunday we did a final walk through and on Monday we got the keys!!!!  On Friday, Jon took the day off work and hired some movers to get the big stuff from the apartment to the house and that very night, we stayed in our new home for the first time!

This house isn't perfect by any means and there will be lots of room from improvements, however it's not a true fixer-upper.  We could move in and not change a thing, but that's not us.  We already decided to de-popcorn the ceilings as our first project, but more on that later. Now that we have our nest, this blog will focus on our projects big, small and anywhere in between!  So we'll leave you with this for now and be ready for some new updates soon!