2nd Floor Texture Is Done

Its been a little bit of time since I've written. This is because of the holiday, frantically trying to finish packing for our move across town, moving and getting the rest of the ceiling texture taken down. It took about about 20 hours to scrape and spray texture for about 1k square feet of ceiling. I still need to paint it. It'll probably take the same amount of time to paint it. Here's the breakdown of things done and things learned for those who don't care about the exposition of my pain.

• It took about 12 hours to prep everything. Even spending that amount of time sealing up the rooms and hallway, there was some cleaning with a shop and regular vacuum.
  
• Scraping the texture wasn't too bad. I made the mistake of not getting the ceiling wet enough. Yeah I know, I said to make sure you get the ceiling was wet enough. I stopped trying to use the bag attachment after the test room. You'd be surprised at what 5 - 10 extra pounds will do to you after 10 minutes.
  
• Using a corded drill with the paint stirrer sped up the joint compound mixing. Be mindful of your paint mixer if its plastic. Mine came right off the metal rod once.
• The mixture and settings for the compound and hopper were pancake batter thick compound, medium spray nozzle and right around 25psi coming out of the air compressor.
  
• I found it best to mix up about two hoppers worth of joint compound at a time. For me this was about a third of the box because I was going for a thick pancake batter consistency.
• When spraying I was too timid when applying texture the first time around I think. I made sure to spray in overlapping strokes this time. It kept me from having to go back and touch up spots.
• Light, light and more light.
• Last thing. Invest in a good respirator instead of those paper masks. I did and I wasn't coughing up particulates that evening.
  

Here is my tale of woe. I decided, like a freak I would get this knocked out in no more than two days. Wednesday and if necessary Friday. I mean really I had done some prep work ahead of time by taping off the sections of wall where the ceiling I was going to scrape met the walls. I had it in my mind I could do it in a day. Right....

Started Wednesday about 9am, consolidated everything upstairs in the bathroom that would not need any work done in it. BTW I'm going to redo that bathroom probably next year. I though cool, all I have to do now is tape up the light fixtures and ceiling lamp then get started on the plastic. Well, I didn't realize there were so many recessed light fixtures in the master. While taping the lights I saw that the vanity area in the master bath needed to be totally prepped too. That added another half hour onto prep. Got done around 12 with all the lights, ceiling fans and moving all the furniture out of the areas.

My wife came with some food about this time. Ate. Got back to work putting up the plastic. It was about 2pm by the time the plastic was up. Got my trusty sprayer and started to soak sections at a time of the master first. Scraping was slow going. I could scrape for about 10 minutes and have to stop to rest for a minute or two. As I finished a room I would spackle the ceiling for a better base to spray on. Because they used the popcorn to hide the imperfections in the ceiling it took me till 6pm to finish that.

Let the spraying begin. I was already tired from scraping and the other stuff done previously. I know, cry some more wussy. My plan at that point was to get the master, vanity area attached to the master and hallway done. Damn that master was huge! To get those sections done I was spraying texture till 9:30pm. I could do no more. So I spent half an hour doing clean-up. Went back to our condo, because at that time we weren't living at the house yet. Funny thing though, I was wearing my new respirator when scraping and spraying. When I got home and looked in the mirror, my entire head was ghost white except for the area where the respirator was.

Took Thanksgiving off.

Started up around 12pm on Friday. I still had two other rooms to do and decided to respray the test room to make sure it was good. That was business as usual until my 8 year old cordless drill gave out on me. Luckily there is an Ace hardware store down the street. Went there instead of the Depot or Lowes because it was Black Friday. Didn't want to spend the money on a cordless so I picked up a Makita 3/8" cored drill. I was amazed at how underpowered my cordless was compare to the Makita. By the way, unlike me you might want to remember that you can take the plastic head off a plastic paint mixer with a good drill. With a little coaxing with a hammer it went back on. This was of course after I had to dig it out of the joint compound. After that I was able spray the rest.

Friday turned out to be fairly straight forward. So in retrospect of writing this I guess it wasn't that bad. Still need to prime and paint everything. Then the downstairs has two rooms that need popcorn removal. Oh, the real kicker will be the 25' ceiling. That will have to wait though.