Reno's With Rosie - Goodbye popcorn ceiling!

The day started out okay with a nice cup of coffee, reading a book, lounging around in my pj's, but.....little did I know.

After a while I heard the sound of busyness coming from the kitchen, a lot of busyness and not the pleasant baking or cooking sounds that foreshadow some kind of deliciousness eventually making it's way onto the table. These noises had a very different feel to them, a bit like that hollow feeling of anxiety (or outright terror) that the "dum dum, dum dum" sound from the movie "Jaws" produces.

The sound of furniture being dragged around produces a similar feeling in me and probably in many other husbands out there. I find myself thinking, "oh, oh, this is going to be expensive!" or "So much for relaxing!" or "I think I'll drive to Jasper for the day." I think it's time I started listening to that voice more carefully.

Back to this particular day - after a while Rose popped her head in and very kindly offered to make me a breakfast sandwich, "you better have breakfast, we're going to take the popcorn stipple off of the kitchen ceiling this morning."

"Huh?" was my clever reply. "Sure, I just watched a video on You-Tube about it and it looks really easy. (Curses to you, You-Tube, what did you have to go and do that for?)

"I left it on the computer, come and watch it." Rose called out, "I'll get things ready and we can do it together!" 
"OOOOHHHH, how fun." said my inner voice, my outside voice wisely said nothing.

But I could see the writing on the wall and actually I was excited about getting rid of the 35 year old gross, greasy, smelly popcorn stipple that should never have been sprayed onto any ceiling, let alone a kitchen!

So I surrendered gracefully and dutifully watched the video filled with some good but obvious suggestions: spray ceiling with water, but not too much! Wear a dust mask, put down a drop cloth, don't damage the ceiling, hold putty knife at 30 degree angle, catch scrapings in a paint tray, etc, etc. 

"Hey, it's not brain surgery buddy!"

4 hours later - it was all, "wow, that looks great, but I'm pooped!" It took a few tries and a little compromise to find a good system for us but we settled on this: Rose sprays the water and wipes excess off the walls, I climb up and scrape the ceiling emptying the tray into the bag that she holds for me and then I go and rest while she sprays the next section and so on.

The hanging cabinet is coming down.

The biggest conflict was trying to get her to wear a dust mask, it went something like this: Rose - "I (cough, cough) don't, (cough, cough) need one, this house is (cough, cough) only 35 years old, there's no asbestos!" Me - "you need to wear one, look, I'm wearing one, didn't you hear him in the video, there could be asbestos, at least keep out of the kitchen while I'm scraping!"

But eventually she found an old one and put it on, (the top of her head) but it finally found it's way down to her mouth and that made me happy, she looked so cute.

We ended up scraping about 20 pounds of stipple off of the ceiling and it really brightened up the room. Last week on my day off we took down a floating cabinet that hung right over the counter, blocking a lot of light and making it hard to properly make use of the counter top. That made a huge difference and really let the light in and made the kitchen look more open and modern. 

A few weeks ago we did the gallery wall in the living room and converted an old coffee table into a dining table, (see previous blog posts) and painted about half of the house. Rose also got a hold of an old leaning shelving unit at the Re-store that we mounted in the hallway and now holds some of our antique book collection and some old cameras of mine.

So all in all, the renovations and redecorating are coming along nicely.

Last week we were lucky enough to have a friend in the machine shop business make us a cool piece of decor from an old gear that came out of a big truck transmission and it looks great in the living room! It kind of matches the huge train station style clock that we mounted over the mantle. 

Another interesting, (and weird) bit of decor that we added recently is my dad's old collection of bowling pins and bowling balls, I would call them, "quirky but cool." My father Ron owned "Continental Engineered Bowling Supplies" way back in the sixties and we kept a few things from that era so it's fun to be able to display them now in a place of honor. 

Future projects: as soon as we can get a hold of a big enough tile cutter we've got a whole bunch of tiling to do on the hearth in the living room, the kitchen floor and the bathroom floor and the tub surround, so we have that to look forward to, "Yay, Not!"

But the truth is, it's kind of fun to get these things done and they're usually not as bad as my overactive imagination makes them out to be, thanks to my lovely, creative wife. 

But when she married me, little did she know...... 

Reno's With Rosie - Creating the Curator Wall (With 2024 Updates)

If it isn't decorating magazines or pinterest, it's television or just talking to someone about what they're doing that inspires my wife Rose. She's always thinking. First comes the inspiration, then the planning, then dropping little hints around the house, "running it by me" just a little bit at a time so I won't get alarmed and the "fight or flee" instinct won't become active. 
Apparently it's a delicate balance.

As for me, usually I have no idea what's going on, I'm just minding my own business and then...wham o! And I have apparently agreed to some kind of expensive renovation, decorating project, major purchase, or vacation, somehow without even being aware of the fact that a decision was in the process of being made!

Oh well, mostly it works itself out and every once in a while I do exercise my veto vote, but not without careful deliberation, at least 5 seconds anyway. Rose gets her own veto vote as well so don't worry, we are an equal partnership (mostly, with a lot of zig-zagging back and forth).

But this particular project was really an excellent idea and it took no convincing at all. I took one look at the picture of the "curator wall" in Rose's magazine and I was on board.

The finished art wall.

After our trip to Italy in 2013, I have been itching to get some of my photographs printed, mounted and displayed around the house. I had already printed a bunch of calendars that turned out pretty well and I had enjoyed some success entering some images in the St. Albert Photo Club monthly competitions in November. One image of the snail or Momo staircase from the Vatican Museum won first place in digital images and another of a woman walking through the early morning mist in Piazza San Marco won second in printed images. Pretty heady stuff, let me tell you!

So when Rose mentioned her idea for showcasing my work, I jumped at the chance. Our first task was to find a suitable piece of galvanized pipe and the mounting flanges to get it up on the wall and properly supported. I looked around and finally found a nice, 6' piece of 1/2" galvanized pipe as well as the elbows and mounting flanges.

Galvanized pipe mounted on the wall from which the artwork hangs.

Meanwhile, Rose had been working on selecting and cleaning up some frames we had recently taken down when we repainted the house. She marked out an area on the floor approximating the size of the wall area we had to work with and we laid out the frames into the most pleasing arrangement we could come up with. 

We didn't want to spend a lot of money on new frames or new mats so she re-painted some of the old mats and painted select parts of the old frames, getting rid of any gold accents and replacing it with silver or black.

Frames with old artwork laid out on the floor.

Next was the hard part for me, choosing what to print, finding good images that told a bit of a story about our trip to Italy. We had this great long narrow frame that had a space for a 12"x36" image and I decided to crop a vertical shot of a man walking up a steep lane in the rain with a bright blue umbrella. It was shot in one of our favorite places in Italy, the town of Belagio on Lake Como in Northern Italy. We both loved the pop of blue and the wet cobblestone steps leading up to the bright opening at the top of the image where there was perhaps a little sun filtering through and illuminating the yellow walls.

Hanging the Images.

Most of the other images weren't hard to decide on. We both love the image of the grand canal in Venice from the foot of the Pont del Accademia with the blue gondolas in the foreground and the sun rising over Piazza San Marco and the Santa Maria della Salute Church.

We printed it in 24"x18"  at London Drugs (along with all of our other printing) and they did a great job. We went with 2 11"x 14" images along the top, the one on the left was taken in Rome, we had just arrived after a bit of a kerfuffle at the train station and then a mix-up picking up our keys and a rude person at the gelateria. While Rose kindly waited in line for some delicious gelato, I listened to the cello playing, tuxedo wearing busker in the most picturesque little alley staircase, it was quite magical and I took a couple of quick pictures (after depositing a few euros in appreciation).

Also in the top center is another shot of Venice taken on a misty morning on one of the smaller canals that criss-cross the city. Our first morning in Venice we woke up to some gorgeous fog blanketing the city and I loved it! On the top right side is a smaller shot of the ceiling in the Pantheon with a nice little beam of light shining through the 27 foot wide oculus. What an amazing building, we visited several times at different times of the day and it was always beautiful. 

Below that is another image from Rome, this one was taken in the Capitoline Museums but I don't remember who it is. The one below it on the right is a fairly modern statue built into the hillside in the town of Monterosso al Mare, Cinque Terre, Italy. This statue called Il Gigante, was built from concrete in 1910 but rough seas and allied bombs during WW2 have left this image of Neptune holding the waves at bay looking pretty forlorn and shabby. We both loved finding the statue there at the end of the beach and we visited it several times (gelato in hand) during our 4 days in Monterosso.

The living room with the couch half finished, but the art wall complete! - 2013

A few years have passed since we put up our Italy photographs and since then we have changed them out twice. The first time we changed it in 2018 to photographs from our Eastern Canada trip that we did with our trailer.

Eastern Canada scenes except for one of the Grand Canal and one of California - 2018

Then in 2024 Rose tired of those images and in an effort to bring the forest into our living room we replaced them again with a mix of B.C. and Alberta forest scenes.

Western Canada forest scenes 2024

In the photo of the 2013 Italy photographs up above a ways, you may notice the partly reupholstered couch. Here it is in late 2024 now and Rose has just ordered fabric to once again re-cover (for the 3rd time) a very comfortable, durable and well loved sofa.

Time just keeps marching on and while some things do change, some things (like that sofa frame) still stay the same.