Tear Down the Walls...er, Ceiling

While we did tear down some sheetrock as I explained in my previous post, I've actually gotten a little out of order. The first "project" we started (notice I said started and not completed) in the house was upstairs in what has become Sagan's playroom: the former sleeping porch. The attic stairs were in terrible, terrible shape. When we were looking through the house before purchasing, my dad braved them, but we knew they would need to be replaced before any more use.

So, eager to do a project in the house, I harassed David until he bought replacement attic stairs so we could get started. The ceiling in that room was in horrible shape. I'm not sure if someone had tried to texturize it or if it had bubbled up years ago in the heat of summer, or really what was going on, but we knew it had to go. Eventually. 

Back to the project at-hand. David pulled down the old stairs, and as he did, he pulled a little bit of ceiling sheetrock down. And voila...wainscoting!! And not just any wainscoting - it was painted haint blue. Be still my heart.

So much for the one-room-at-a-time approach to fixing up our house.

Actually - speed up my heart. Once we saw what was under the ceiling, we chunked away more ceiling. And more. And then stopped. There was black dust all over the back of the sheetrock, and it worried us that it could be black mold. Sagan was in the house, so we stopped for the night, took her to Granna and Granddaddy's the next morning, and started back in on our project, armed with plastic over the doors, eye protection, and masks. 

After pulling down a few more large pieces of sheetrock, we realized that the black was either old ash or dust from the attic. Crisis averted.

We pulled down the rest of the ceiling. It's now a month or more later, and it's still exactly as it was when we finished pulling the sheetrock down, but we are excited about the much cleaner slate we have for that room upstairs once we work on it.

 

It was dark out, and the room was filthy, but you get the idea!

Let there be wainscoting...and haint blue!

Oh, and we have functioning, safe attic stairs. Hello, tons of floored storage in the attic!

Haint blue...years ago, people in the south painted the ceilings of their porches a light blue color to mimic the color of the sky. There are said to be several reasons for this one of which was that it kept wasps away. They wouldn't build nests on the ceiling because they thought it was sky. Key West is one of our favorite places ever, and the majority of the porches of the homes there have haint blue ceilings. While on a ghost tour for fun, the tour leader explained that the haint blue was thought to keep spirits away also, because they would be confused and think the blue was the sky. 

While we don't subscribe to the theory of keeping spirits away, we do love the idea of having haint blue on our porch ceilings, so expect that once we tackle the exterior of the house. But finding it here, in what used to be a sleeping porch, was very exciting for us!