Continuing on the Living Room Ceiling

Last weekend, we got going again on the living room ceiling. We started work on it back in September, with scraping the popcorn finish off, and then K adding one skimcoat to the ceiling and coves. But then in October we had our housewarming party and wanted to use the living room, so we took the ram board up off the floor and made it back into a usable room.

Through the winter, we added some salvaged chairs, put stuff on the bookcases, etc. Now all that needed to be moved out again in order to work on the room We decided to pull off the baseboards around the floors, since it's in bad shape-- too many layers of paint, and too many dents through all the years of use. It will make painting the walls and re-finishing the floor easier, too.

K pulling off the base boards

And look at what we found underneath the trim --  More pink paint!

Was this whole house pink at one time?  That baby/cotton candy pink in the basement, and then this corally pink that's in the living room and the stairwell...  Fun!

Pink paint dripped underneath the trim...  Old wall color!

K added a new skimcoat to the ceiling and coves, and I went behind and knocked down the thick spots.  Mudding is certainly NOT her favorite job, but now that the room is all messy again, we're planning to just keep plugging away until it's done.

Yesterday we worked on rebuilding the coves.  We don't know if the popcorn finish was put on the ceiling originally or later.  K thinks that the coves are probably a bit uneven like they are, because they put the popcorn finish on it right away and so the coves didn't need to be perfect.  The coves are a bit thin in areas, and certainly aren't as sharp as we'd like them to be.  And in knocking off the layer of popcorn finish, bits of the coves crumbled off, too, so they're pretty lumpy looking, and we definitely needed to build them back up to make them look sharp again.

K added some thicker & stronger mud to just the coves to rebuild them, and after sanding they're going to look really nice!