Since all it's done for the last two and a half months is rain, I decided it was time to get back into working inside my house, it needs to be ready to move into before winter, and at the rate I get things done, I'll need every minute between now and then. The priority right now is to get the living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway ready for paint. The sheetrock is mostly done, I have a few finish-ups, and then I'm going to call in a contractor to do the texture.
One thing that's bothered me from the start is how I was going to patch/match the texture on the ceiling where I removed a wall between the living room and dining room. This house has nasty "popcorn" ceilings, that is, sprayed-in-place texture. Removing the wall opened a hole all the way into the attic. One of my first projects was to put two layers of ½" sheetrock in the hole and slop some mud in the cracks tentatively, just to keep the rodents and files in the attic out of the house. Or vice-versa, whatever.
You can see the elongated patch-job here:
Yesterday, I put my phobias aside (at least, the one about patching the ceiling) and began feathering the edges of the patch into the rest of the ceiling using drywall joint compound. By this morning, after a second session, it actually looked pretty good. Not matched to the ceiling texture, but fairly well blended into the (not at all flat) contours of the ceiling.
When my insane helper ripped out the wall, he helpfully purchased a spray can of "textured ceiling touch up" material. I checked around on the internet and asked some contractor acquaintances, and they all told me that it "works OK, but you can still see that the ceiling has been patched". Well, if that's the best I can do... I fetched the still sealed can off the shelf and read the instructions. From the sound of it, most of the material ends up on the floor, it looks to be a very messy process. That and the can I was holding "covered 2 square feet". I was going to need at least four cans of this stuff, at $11.99 per can!
The can label also proclaimed in proud text that it "contains real polystyrene fragments" and "cleans up with water" Hmmm, sounds like it's ground-up plastic peanuts and drywall mud in a pressurized can. If all it does is an "OK" job, I can figure out how to make this stuff myself for a lot less money!
Dug around in the back bedroom and found some scraps of styrene sheet, probably packing from one or the other shipments of light bulbs from TMAX. Used an Xacto knife and a pair of scissors to shred up a teaspoon or so of material. Of course, it sticks to everything. No fun. Used an old laundry detergent measuring cup to mix the shreds and some drywall mud, plus some water. Too soupy on the first try. Had to make more shreds and add more mud to stiffen the mixture up a bit.
Once I had a consistency that I was comfortable with, I experimented with applying it to some sheetrock scraps, first with a toothbrush, then a thin oak stick, and finally using a putty knife, scraping the result off the test board and back into the cup after each try. It didn't seem to matter much how I applied it, and holding the test board up to the ceiling for comparison showed that the results were "OK" for sure, and probably better.
Time to try it on the ceiling. I was going to need a lot more shreds, and since I had managed to shred the end of my finger with the knife making a thimbleful, I needed a better way of making material.
Out came the blender! I filled the top with cubes of styrofoam, put on the lid and hit "Purée". Not much happened. After the cubes on the bottom had been reduced to slivers, nothing more got ground up. Since I was going to have to add water to the mixture anyway, I decided that I'd just dump in a few cups of water to the blender. Success! Let the machine run for about 30 seconds and the result was a cup or two of what looked like shaved ice. All of the foam shreds floated to the top, leaving pretty much clear water at the bottom.
Whipped up another, bigger batch of texture. It took a bit of jiggling, as the foam shreds held too much water, making the mixture soupy again. I found that grabbing a handful of shreds and squeezing them before adding them to the mixing pot gave just the right amount of moisture. The end result looked exactly like dry, small-curd cottage cheese.
It took me about 15 minutes to apply the texture to a 4X4 patch on the ceiling (you can see it in the photo above, to the left of the long patch). Part of this was due to getting the technique of patting the texture onto the ceiling down correctly, and partly because I kept finding small areas outside the 4X4 area that had been scraped or otherwise damaged and needed filling.
After letting it sit for a few minutes, I used the putty knife to "pat down" or "float" the patch, drawing some of the moisture and wet mud to the surface. When I was done, I was ~very~ satisfied with the appearance, and there were only a few crumbs of texture on the floor, not the shit-storm that the spray can promised.
As the patch dried, it shrank just a bit and the surface moisture fell back, making the patch look even more like the surrounding ceiling. I won't have a final verdict until the patch gets painted, but this has to be at least as good as anything else I could have done, and it cost nearly nothing.
Tomorrow, I'll start on the long patch and maybe the ceiling will be ready for paint!
The owner is gonna have my son do some remodeling on the house so he can sell it. My son is gonna drywall right over that stuff cuz it would be such a mess to try and smooth it out and take forever (IF it could even be done).