Home Repair Deep Thoughts

[mollyringle]

There is so much cruelty, ugliness, and evil out there whose existence I cannot fathom. For example, why, I ask you--in the name of mercy and everything decent--why, oh why, did anyone ever, at any point, think it was a good idea to spray popcorn ceilings on in their homes?

Priming and painting; calling furnace contractors; installing new floors; packing all our stuff into boxes--all of those things are looking downright fun in comparison to getting those &$#@% ceilings scraped clean.

Comments

Cheap! Cheap!

[(Anonymous)]

The reason is easy - when you're a builder, if you can drag someone off the street, hand them a compressor, say, "Hey, point this at the ceiling and pull this lever", and have them do a ceiling in 30 minutes, as opposed to hiring a good drywall finisher and waiting for 3 - 4 days of mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding.... you're going to hire the guy who can pull the lever. When it comes to commodity home construction, cheapness rules.

That being said, I hope the house is relatively new, since up until the late 1970's, the "popcorn" material was primarily asbestos, and scraping it off without the use of a respirator is a really, really bad idea. In lots of places, you'll need an approved remediation firm to do it legally.

Re: Cheap! Cheap!

[elycia.livejournal.com]

Re asbestos: Ayup. I used to work for a firm that produced training materials for OSHA asbestos-abatement instruction/certification. It ain't easy, it ain't cheap, and it sure the heck ain't safe unless you've got the proper equipment and know how to do containment properly.

But I'd still be willing to swap doing THAT for destroying my entire kitchen. ;-)

Re: Cheap! Cheap!

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

Oh, and yeah, we were paranoid about the asbestos, so my husband got the proper variety of respirator to use. But we were still being a bit careless about it, so it was a relief when the lab results came back negative for it. Whew. :)