The Home Renovations Seem to be Never Ending!
Home Renovations Seem to be Never Ending!
If you have been following my blog at all you know that Bea and I have been slowly renovating the house we bought here in Las Vegas. It was stuck in the early 2000s when we bought it and have been slowly bringing it into the 21st century. So far we have done the living room, the kitchen and I am 98% finished with the garage. It has been an extremely slow and frustrating process. Every time we start a new room, there seems to be something that has to be repaired or redone. I don’t know if it’s that the house was built poorly, or if it just hasn’t wasn’t kept up properly, but all of the repairs are starting to get tiring.
So, because I’m a glutton for punishment I finally started with the master bedroom and bathroom renovation. It all started with trying to fix the cracked and sloping ceiling over our tub. I watched so many Youtube videos and I read so many home improvement blogs, but I still had no idea where to start. So, I just jumped right in and cut a hole into the ceiling to get a better sense of what I was going to deal with. And what I found was not what I was hoping to. The crack that was running down the ceiling was because when it was installed they didn’t use any seam tape. And on top of that, the drywall isn’t even screwed into the ceiling joists properly. There is an inch or so space between the joists and the drywall. That means that the drywall is just suspended there (like a fake drop ceiling), and the screw heads are taking all of the weight of the drywall and crazy thick texture.
After browsing through a few more websites and Youtube videos I decided that I would cut three or four bigger square holes in the ceiling and join the ceiling back together with a piece of 1 x 2 to hopefully help cover up the crack. I did not add the joint tape, like one should do because the ceiling texture is just so crazy I wasn’t sure how to blend it back in. So with my holes cut and the 1 x 2’s in the ceiling, it was sorta coming back together. After that I did tape up the squares I cut out and attempted to mud the ceiling. I found another video showing how to add the texture back onto the ceiling. I found a texture sponge-like they mentioned in the video and got to work… It did not turn out well. It ends up that there are different kinds of texture sponges depending on the thickness of the texture. I did not realize this, so I did the best I could with the material that I had. In the end, after painting the ceiling a nice clean white to cover up the smoker’s yellow ceiling, it did look a lot better. And if you squint your eyes and look at it in just the right light you can’t even tell there was ever a crack.
Since I painted the ceiling, it was time to start painting the rest of the master bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom was painted this weird smoker yellow, which must have been on sale since half the house was this color, and then they just cut in this terrible green color for half of the bathroom. And that included the toilet room, which was entirely green, to include the ceiling. After about two weeks, I finally was able to get everything painted the new color, grayish, and you can find it here, at Lowe’s. The color is so much better, and it brings the room into this century as far as looks are concerned. The last of the improvements will be adding new faucets as well as replacing the old chrome shower and tub spouts and handles with new oiled bronze ones.
If you haven’t seen some of the other work done around the house you can check those out here.
Gap between ceiling and ceiling jousts
trying to join the crack
drywall tape is up
after a few coats of mud
some various progress pictures
nice white paint