When In Rome...

do as the Romans do.  But since I'm not anywhere close to Rome, I'll just hang a (fake) roman shade and call it good.

Have you ever been bothered by something so much that you absolutely had to do something about it real quick like?  That's what happened to me with those cafe curtains I hung in the storage room (see the reveal here...I almost called this post the re-reveal but thought that might be a bit too far).  The curtain fabric was cute (and free!) and it paired nicely with the wall color...but that's it.  They were just wrong in here; not my favorite; best placed somewhere else.

In all reality, they didn't look too too bad but I had couldn't let go of the roman shade look and once you see those up, I think you'll agree that the cafe curtains had to go. 

Skim Coating the Bathroom Ceiling

I'm probably too happy to say that we finally have smooth ceilings in the kids bathroom!!!!!!!  It was a daunting project that we stared down the past month but finally tackled.  It only took us almost five years to get from painted popcorn that wouldn't budge to the leveled plane they are now.  Well, that and a good amount of joint compound and elbow grease.

When we first found out that we wouldn't be able to get the popcorn texture on this ceiling off like we did the others in our house, we talked about maybe covering them with something like tongue and groove planks or some sort of paneling but after researching how to skim coat (putting a thin coat of joint compound on top of the texture to make it look smooth), we decided to go that direction so they'd match all of the other ceilings in the house.  Not that all ceilings have to match because I definitely would not agree with that, but more importantly, putting on a skim coat was the cheapest option coming in (for us, because we had half the tools we needed) at just around $30.

While we should have done this ages ago, what really kick-started it was the fact that the popcorn above the shower was starting to crack and come off thanks to the super hot, super long showers our kids like to take.  At first, we got excited thinking that maybe the added humidity had, over time, dug into the texture making it removable now.  But, as we started chipping away at the stuff coming off above the shower, we realized we could only get so far until we were stuck once again with popcorn that wouldn't budge.

This is as far as we got:

With our hopes of an easy removal dashed, we planned out our first experience putting on a skim coat.