Not Quite Perfect

The Sistine Chapel this ain't.

There's a fine line between "rustic" and "just plain crappy." Bakers describe a loaf of bread as rustic when it's made simply, without special tools or fancy ingredients, or any particular skill. "Rustic" art is a nice way of saying it's amateurish and unprofessional. Well, I am hereby declaring our ceiling rustic.

One corner of our 2nd-floor dining room tucks under the stairs that lead up to the 3rd floor. That creates a low, out-of-the-way corner perfect for storage and whatnot. Like the rest of the room, the ceiling was covered in a heavily textured wallpaper that was then painted over by a later generation.

We're leaving most of the textured wallpaper in place, but we wanted to remove it from the low-ceiling portion of the room. Stripping wallpaper is pretty straightforward -- it holds no terror for us anymore -- so this seemed like a simple project. Wrong.

This particular wallpaper seems to have been glued on with some sort of defense-grade molecular bonding agent. It just won't come off. Kathy spent days and days scraping over her head, scratching off bits and flakes of it. She'd soak it with special wallpaper remover, dig at it with a sharp scraping knife, and get rewarded with a postage stamp-sized smidgen of wallpaper. It's tiring, demoralizing work, but once you start you have to keep going. You can't leave the ceiling half-scraped.

Even after she got all the wallpaper off, the pattern remained. The wallpaper is so heavily textured that the glue filled in the back side of the design and left behind a hardened epoxy-like texture that's even less attractive than the wallpaper was. How are we going to get that off?

Just digging at it with a sharp tool didn't really work, and it tended to gouge out the underlying plaster. Plus, it's tedious, over-your-head work. We tried soaking it with more wallpaper solvent, but that just turned the ancient adhesive into a sticky mess. It was still hard to scrape off, but now it was gooey, too.

So we decided to go the other way. Instead of scraping off all the texture (which we probably couldn't accomplish anyway), we decided to cover it over with our own texture. We waited for all the wet, gooey stuff to dry, then sanded down the worst parts with 120-grit on a hand block. Then we plastered over the entire ceiling with a thin skim coat of drywall compound.

We spread just enough mud to disguise the wallpaper pattern, maybe 1/16 of an inch. When that dried, we sanded it down a bit, applied a second coat to the areas that needed extra attention, and then sanded those. When it was all done, the old ceiling texture was entirely disguised under the new plaster. Voila! 

Trouble is, I'm not a very good plasterer. I can't hide seams very well, and I'm not good at sanding out imperfections. But in this case, that's what we wanted. We don't want the ceiling finish to look perfectly smooth, we want it to look just as imperfect as the rest of the house. Fortunately for me, imperfect is what I do best.

So now we have a "rustic" ceiling finish in the corner of the dining room that looks pretty much like it would have originally. You can almost pretend that it was done by a third-generation master plasterer in the 19th Century, instead of a modern amateur with two left hands.