Who would have guessed that the Punch List we put together this weekend would spur on another bathroom renovation less than 48 hours after putting pen to paper?
Welcome to our guest bathroom, y’all. This is the first room we ever painted, and now it’s on its way to becoming the first room we’ll re-paint in this place.
Our guest bathroom has always been more utilitarian than anything else. It was our first room to renovate and we’ve learned a lot about painting, trim work, and patching walls since then. It used to look like this.
Let’s bring you up to speed on what we’ve done in this room to date. Here’s the vanity area where we hung a nice framed mirror in place of the old builder-grade one and started painting the old oak vanity a nice chocolate brown color.
These are a few canvases from Hobby Lobby I painted brown and then added circles in our accent colors with a small cup dipped in paint.
I promise there were towels and a shower curtain in this room before we started emptying it out last night. We originally wanted a “spa-like” feel, so the shower curtain was a nice thick hotel-style white one with fluffy white towels to match.
Looking around the corner, we hung some metal wall art above the toilet with a basket that typically holds washcloths and extra TP.
Here’s a glance back at the door to the room, which was originally wood with wood trim. One more coat of glossy white paint and the bathroom door will be the most finished thing in this room!
Ok, so you may be wondering why we’re bothering with a room makeover when it seems like we should be almost done in here, right?
All you have to do is look up, and you’ll have your answer. The dreaded popcorn ceiling! If you’ll recall from our Punch List yesterday, here’s what we wanted to accomplish in this room.
Guest Bath
A – Paint doorknob
A – Finish painting vanity
A – Paint door & trim (working on it)
A – Scrape popcorn ceilings
A – Paint walls
A – Replace white baseboards
B – Replace faucet
B – Replace light fixture
B – Replace HVAC register
C – Replace counter top & sink
C – Fix exhaust fan
We know from experience that ceiling scraping is a messy business. It’s also almost impossible to do without ruining the paint job on your walls, and since we have zero paint left in our original blue wall color it was a perfect opportunity to repaint!
Stephen detests painting, so while I was in the hallway painting trim, he volunteered to start scraping the popcorn ceiling in our bathroom. We taped a tarp over the doorway to contain the mess and then he got started spraying and scraping.
By the end of the bulk of the scraping, the bathroom doorway looked like this.
And after several trips outside to “shake it off,” our hallway looked like this.
Stephen is super fast when it comes to manual tasks like this, but once he’d gotten the majority of the popcorn off, it was my turn to go back through with a softer touch and remove the last 5% of the texture (which I’ve discovered takes just as long as removing the first 95%).
When we posted our punch list yesterday, one of our readers asked how scraping the popcorn ceilings fell into the “free fix” category.
Our secret is that we don’t add any texture back to the ceilings once we’re done scraping. I will go back through with a putty knife and spackel and fix any mistakes we made, and then we’ll prime and paint! Since we’ve got spackel, primer and ceiling paint on hand already, it should truly be a free project if all goes well.
Once the ceilings are done, I promise some up close and personal shots of the finished result so you can decide for yourself if you like ’em smooth or if you’re a re-texturing kind of person.
After all that work, we get to add a big ol’ “working on it” beside this item on our list.
A – Scrape popcorn ceilings (working on it)
And we get to attempt to restore order to our house just in time for the overnight guest we’ll be hosting this evening. Oops. I think we may have picked the wrong night to make a mess…
What do you think of our progress? Have you scraped popcorn ceilings before? Any thoughts on the smooth vs textured look?
