Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Scraping, Scraping, Scraping Along!

We have taken a break from door hanging and utter failure, as it takes two to move that door. We won't be in the house at the same time together until Monday. Look for an update on Tuesday on that.

Today I worked on another part of the bathroom: the walls.

Here is the lovely textured and badly patched walls*:
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Using THESE...
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...a safety mask and a scraper (with a very sharp blade) that I got from Habitat for $1 (yeah Habitat), I started to scrape off most of the texture.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

It's very messy and dusty work*. I lined the edges of my walls with newspapers to catch the droppings.

Here is how far I got today:
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A closer look:
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2 more walls to go, and then onto sanding, mudding, and repainting.

Maybe if I pretend it's normal to not have a door on a bathroom, I can avoid dealing with the utter failure, too. Think it will work?

* Note... this is new drywall installed 4 years ago with only two layers of new paint on it (plus the nasty texture). If I was doing this to one of the much older walls in my house (which I will likely do if this turns out well), I would use a ventilator to avoid breathing in lead dust from the lead paint.

6 comments:

Fred said...

Was the texture paint or spray-on texture? That's tedious work, and from your comment, I know that some of the spray-on textures have asbestos in them.

Jennifer said...

Not sure... I believe it's the spray on kind, since patched a bare spot with the spray on.

Luckily, this particular room was redrywalled 4 years ago, so there is no chance of lead paint OR asbestos. :) I'll keep that in mind for my other walls and get tests run before we think about scraping them!

Anonymous said...

Wow! That is some major texture on the walls there. Crazy! It looks like it will be really nice when you are done fixing them though. :)

Anonymous said...

i am so impressed with your work! can't wait to see how your project turns out!
adrienne (the fixer upper house)

Unknown said...

You may want to consider skim coating rather than the scraping that you are up to.
I have a short tutorial here:
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/photos/smoothwall/index.html
Since it was drywalled 4 years ago the asbestos is not an issue as it was phased out of drywall, popcorn and mud over 20 years ago.
The texture looks to be a sprayed on 'knock down' texture. Regular mud shot out of a texture gun and them knocked down with a drywall knife.

The trade oof with skim coating is more work with drywall knives, but less repair and only one major sanding event.

Jennifer said...

Thanks all... it should make the bathroom look a lot nicer.

Head Lemur~ That is exactly what I am planning to do... but with texture sticking off the walls 1/4 inch in a tiny room, I decided to scrape it off first. This room can take any space it can get!

Funny enough, it was your tutorial that gave me the confidence to start this... so THANKS! I will surely add it to the post about skim coating that will come up soon. :)