Kitchen/Dining Room Renovation - Part 3

The ceiling is finally done! With the help of my son-in-law, all of the bad drywall sections on the ceiling were patched and I learned to mud them by watching videos and through practice.  Not bad for an amateur but it could have been better.  I'll probably hire a professional the next time I need any drywall taped and mudded. I'm sure I could get better but as infrequently as I will be doing that, it just doesn't make sense. Unless it's a small patch, I would recommend hiring a professional to anyone who may be thinking of doing it themselves.

Almost ready to mud

After tape and plastic

 I thought about spraying the texture on the ceiling myself after the first place quoted me $250 to do it. Since I had taped and put up plastic around the whole kitchen and put plastic and paper on the floor, this seemed a bit exorbitant. Fortunately I found a guy who would do it for $150 and I hired him. Plus points for me because after watching him do it I realized that was one job that was definitely out of my comfort zone. He did a great job! If I had to do it again, I would have made one change and would have had him mix Kilz 2 in with the texture.

There were water stains on the drywall that wasn't replaced and after the texture dried, those stains bled through. He told me to wait at least 48 hours before painting it so on Sunday I applied Kilz 2 to the entire kitchen ceiling. The results were excellent! I added a new LED light fixture to the ceiling and was almost done.

Ceiling complete!

After the repairs, you could feel the heat radiating from the attic at the points where the drywall was replaced due to the lack of insulation in those areas. About ten o'clock last night I climbed up into the attic crawl space with a roll of insulation and took care of that issue. Not fun. No, I mean REALLY not fun. I'm sure it was the equivalent of a couple of hours in a sauna.

We couldn't sand the cabinets in the house due to the wet ceiling so on Saturday we sanded the cabinet doors in the shed outside. With the help of my eldest daughter and my son-in-law, we were able to finish sanding them in just a few hours.  Hard work but the help was sure appreciated! One of the best uses of some of my budget money was the purchase of a Dewalt Heavy-Duty Random Orbit Sander. That doesn't link to the exact one I bought since mine doesn't have the hard case but it is close. I would highly recommend buying something similar if you have to do a lot of sanding.

Here is the picture which probably best shows what the ceiling looked like before I started. I wish I had taken some of just the ceiling but this was not a "planned" part of this project. LOL