Cheese Should be on Your Bagel Not Your Ceiling

As I mentioned before in this post our house was a builder inventory house.  A builder inventory house is a house a builder finishes off completely and then sells which means, they pick the finishes.  There are a lot of finishes in this house that I would never have picked.  The kitchen is obviously one of them as you can see, but another biggie are stucco ceilings aka in this house as ceiling cheese.

I am a firm believer that cheese should remain on your bagel and not on your ceilings.  Sadly, I had this on my ceilings.

When we did our initial post sale builder walk through, I asked the rep about the ceiling cheese and how to get rid out if.  He said, easy spray it down with water and scrape it off.  I thought that seemed just a bit too easy to be true.

Incredible but true, regular, builder grade stucco is a water based product.  I used an old spray bottle and some hot water and sprayed it down.  I let it sit for a new minutes, then scrapped.  It came off super easy. The big catch is, it has to have never been painted.  If its been painted, the only thing you can do to get rid of it is to sand it off (the horror) or drywall over it.

Now don't get me wrong, it was really way easier than I had thought it would be, but it was SUPER messy.  I bought a roll of plastic vapor barrier and sealed off everything I could.  I looked like a snow person by the time I was done.  The ceiling looked AMAZING, my ladder didn't fare quite as well.

We had to fill in a few dings in the ceiling but nothing major like I had feared.  It was even hard to photograph.

I had visions of clean modern for my son's room.  I would have loved to put a George Nelson bubble lamp  in his room but I just couldn't justify the money.

I found a Fillsta light at Ikea that fit the bill and the price point I was looking for.

The clean smooth ceiling looks so much better than the stucco ever did. Gone are the stalactite projections from the ceiling that cast odd shadows from the light.

Now that the ceiling is done and the new Ikea light installed, my next challenge is to convince my son to let me paint his walls.  I think a nice light grey would look great with his modern light, furniture and light oak floor.