'Ceiling' is a Funny Word

One of the more recent improvements to our home was giving the kitchen a new ceiling. As you can see from the attached photos we had some very prominent problems with our kitchen ceiling and some not so noticeable. Among the obvious problems were the two patched holes in the ceiling.

The first hole, closer to the center of the room, was created by my foot. Rewind close to two years and you would find a bathroom that had been completely gutted down to open framing and floor joists. The original bathroom was gross and had busted pipes in the floor from the home being unattended during the ice storm of '07, so we had no choice but to do a full renovation of the room before we would move into the house. I managed to get the entire room properly demolished, cleaned out, re-plumbed, and re-wired all while balancing on floor joists. Ironically, it was when I was installing the last section of floor that I accidentally missed a joist and stepped down on the lathe and plaster that made up the ceiling of the kitchen below me. It broke and buckled underneath me but didn't give completely thankfully as I would've ended up creating an unnecessary elevator shaft in a hurry while testing it out without the elevator.

The other hole along the wall came from stupidity and not from an unavoidable accident like its predecessor. This hole was cut by me and on purpose. One day, not long after getting the bathroom completed (or completed enough to move in) my plumbing sprung a leak. Jodi yelled at me from the kitchen when it began to rain in there without a single warning from any one of our many local meteorologists. I quickly ran down to the basement and shut the main water valve off so that it would stop no matter where it was coming from. I thought for sure that it was a pipe that I put in the bathroom and now it was covered up with a 3/4" plywood sub-floor, a 1/2" Hardibacker cement board underlay, roughly 1/16" hardened thin-set mortar, a 1/4" of ceramic tile, and finally 36" of bathroom cabinets. There was no way that I could get back in there to fix it from the top. I would have to come in from underneath. So, away I went with a hammer, crowbar, and jigsaw. I opened up a pretty long section so that I could see almost all of the plumbing that I did along the wall where the leak seemed to be coming from. But, I didn't see anything obvious causing the leak. Upon turning the water back on to spot the exact source of the problem, I realized that the water was not coming from inside the floor but from above in the bathroom itself. I went upstairs and almost immediately saw the problem upon opening up the cabinet to the left sink. One of my thin plastic water lines that feed the sink had popped off the connection point due to not having the nut tight enough. Oops. I tightened it up and the problem was solved. Except for the second big hole in the kitchen ceiling.

Well, my dad helped me lay drywall over the top of the plaster some weeks ago which gave us a flat ceiling again. I finally got the mudding, sanding, and primering done. And then Daniel Sybouts came by and he showed me how to wallpaper a ceiling. It looks really great and I can't wait to see the finished product after it's all painted. We're going to give it a faux-finish to make it appear to be a tin ceiling. It's hard to tell from the photos, but the wallpaper is textured with a classy design similar to what tin ceilings would have. And pay no attention to the color of the photo. The paper as well as the globes of the light are white but there was no way to get them to look white and still show the definition of the pattern at the same time.

The light came to us for free. It was donated to our church for the "Pass It On" program that gives Christmas gifts away to area residents who might otherwise not have anything to give to their loved ones. All the pieces to the light fixture were there in a box, but the thing was so mangled from having been loose that the church didn't even set it out among the gifts to choose from. Rather, they were going to donate it to Habitat for Humanity or somewhere that might repair it. Jodi volunteered for the "Pass It On" event and when she asked about it they gave it to her. With some tightening up and leveling out and bending back the inner rod to a straight position it looks beautiful.

Posted in: home renovation