Walking on the Ceiling

This is a post that I've been meaning to write for a few days, but we've been so busy that I just haven't gotten around to it.  You'd think that being on Spring Break would give me more time to do things like blog, but I had more homework to do over Spring Break than I've had all year.

Anyway, not this past weekend, but the weekend before we decided to start working on the ceiling in the family room.  It had some pretty nasty "patches" on it and had pillowed pretty badly so we knew we needed to bring it all down and put new drywall back up.  But first we had to pull down all the old.  Saturday morning we started pulling down the ceiling.  It was dusty and dirty and we found a huge mouse nests in one corner....complete with more mouse poop, so that was fun.  But we finally got it all down.

We also had to lay down quite the path to get the old drywall out to the garage and the new drywall in.  We wanted to protect the floors, but it involved tearing my living room apart.

Then, we had an issue to work on.  Because the ceiling joists weren't close enough (they were 24" instead of 16") we also needed to fix that, but we didn't want to have to replace all the ceiling joists.  Instead we put up some metal channels running perpendicular to the original joists that were 16" apart. And, because that room with it's vaulted ceilings is always cold, we also decided to put up some additional foam insulation between the channels for some additional R value.  That took a good part of the day.

FInally, we were ready to hang some drywall.  Thankfully our friend Jason came over to help and we had rented a drywall lift from Home Depot (it was the best $35 we could have spent).  It was a slow process, and we needed the extra hands.  By the time we got finished, it was nearly midnight and we were all exhausted.  But, we had hung all the drywall except for the last row--it was the highest point, but it was also only about 1/3 of a sheet, so Landon and Alan took care of it the next day by themselves.

Anyway, there is now a whole new ceiling in the family room.  It's been taped and mudded and sanded.  At this point, it needs just a little more work and it will be ready for paint.  And it looks so much better than the old ceiling.  Even if it did nearly kill us.