I love a weekend project!!! I love a long weekend project even more!!! May Long Weekend, we guarded our schedule. No plans, except to stay home, work hard and make a big change in our home. My hubby and I have travelled to New Orleans twice. On both trips, I was so inspired by "NOLA style." I have always loved shabby chic decor, New Orleans takes shabby chic to a whole other level. It's broken, it's old, it's water damaged and possesses a level of splendour...fit for royalty. Old School "French Decadence." I love it!
After our first trip to New Orleans, I painted all of our kitchen cabinets white and ordered crystal knobs on Etsy. $1 each and they were real glass...Nice work right? When I walk into my kitchen in the morning, I admire the prisms on the kitchen floor. Beautiful. These door knobs bring me joy.
After our most recent trip, to NOLA, I added wallpaper the ceiling to the list. Wallpaper the ceiling? Nuts right? Totally worth the effort. I'm beyond thrilled with the result.
My kitchen ceiling had problems. Big Problems. Popcorn texture with fluorescent lighting. The kind of lighting you'd find in an office. I have avoided working on the ceiling since we bought the house, fourteen years ago. I was terrified of what we would find underneath the two office banks of fluorescent lighting, featured on my ceiling. There would probably be holes, maybe different ceiling textures, different ceiling colours? I had imagined a list of potential problems as long as my arm. A word of advice...don't do this. Just look. Unscrew the light fixture. See what's there. You can always just put it back up. I could have saved myself some work had I done that, though I would not nearly be as thrilled with the result as I am currently. Underneath my ugly fluorescent lights were two standard light fixture boxes. One for each light bank. I could have installed any type of lighting into the lighting box and the popcorn ceiling would have been undisturbed. We did have to move one, but that would have meant a minor repair to the popcorn ceiling, cutting a new hole for a secondary box and pulling some wires. Simple.
It was out of my fear, that a plot to remove the fluorescent lighting was born. Our kitchen ceiling is not attached to any other part of the house's ceiling. We knew that we could install a "feature" and not have to carry it through the rest of the house. After many discussions, my husband and I decided to put a textured wallpaper onto our ceiling. The texture on the paintable wallpaper that we found, mimicked a tin tile. As you may or may not know, hatching an idea is only the first part of a plan. Actually installing it and deciding upon how to install it is the more difficult aspect of the planning process.
Our ceiling is sloped, it is almost 12' high on one side of the room and about 8.5 or 9' on the other. That's high, really high! We opted to put drywall directly on top of the popcorn ceiling. I'm 5' tall. This was going to be challenging!
Enter Drywall Lift. Wow! This saved our backs and a lot of time. We rented it for four hours at Home Depot for approximately $40. Best money spent throughout the process of this reno! It was simple to use and saved our old backs! To use the drywall lift, you place your sheet of drywall onto the lift. You then turn a wheel which lifts the sheet of drywall and levels it with the ceiling. Turn the wheel until the sheet perfectly meets up with the ceiling and then screw it into the existing ceiling. So simple. If you've already marked the studs on the ceiling, you line your drywall screws up with your markings. Even more simple.
In order to save money, we made sure all prep work was completed before picking up our Drywall Lift.
Ok. That joke never gets old. Stud Finder!!!! I'm sure my hubby is tired of it! I have always claimed to be a "stud finder," that's how I picked him! Regardless as to where my talents lay, he always insists on using the little yellow thing that beeps and lights up to find studs. He marked them right onto the ceiling with a marker to use as a reference when screwing the new drywall onto the ceiling. He also picked up a nifty little lighting cutter to cut out light fixtures. The lighting cutter looked like a compass and cut perfect holes into the drywall which fit over the lighting boxes. All of this work was complete before the Drywall Lift was picked up.
I also started priming walls as a new ceiling deserves a new wall colour. Currently, my favourite colour is Vintage White. If that even counts as a colour! I'm slowly painting the whole house to white and grey. I'll add additional colours with beautiful accents. Like my teal coffee maker, my red Kitchen Aid or funky throw pillows.
Once the drywall boards were installed, we used drywall tape to cover seams, after the tape was dry, we installed the wallpaper. Maybe you know this about me, maybe you don't? Instructions aren't fully my thing. Sometimes there's just a better way. Anytime my husband and I install wallpaper, we use wall adhesive, pictured below, there's no wetting preglued sheets of paper for me!!!! Way too messy!!! I love this product and use it all of the time, even with preglued paper. You simply paint the surface and the back of the wallpaper and then position accordingly. It dries quickly but you still have some time to push out air bubbles or reposition your paper. Similar to water installation but less drippy, sticky and wet.
When painting on your glue, you're going to need a long clean space. The hallway was just perfect! We glued our sheets horizontally across the ceiling, right over the lighting boxes. Holes to accommodate lighting were marked and cut, after the fact.
This was certainly tiring work. The long weekend I budgeted to complete the job was nuts. Glue needs time to dry, especially if you're painting your ceiling grey. We had to allow 24 hours for the glue to cure before painting, which gave us time to stop, enjoy our kids and attend a family dinner. A girl's gotta have some fun!
We chose a grey paint for the ceiling. When painting a ceiling, you need a relatively thick paint, otherwise it drips. Also, when you're working with texture, you require a high pile roller. However, even with a high pile roller, it was challenging to achieve full coverage. Get ready for some hard work, many coats of paint and perhaps even stippling with a paint brush while standing on the top rung of the ladder.
Work hard, be patient (I totally wasn't), enjoy time with someone you love and this job will make you feel accomplished by the time you're done. I'm so happy with my NOLA Kitchen.
Please feel free to comment below if you have any concerns, questions or you just enjoyed this Big Idea. Thanks for reading!!
