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.