There are many nice things about home ownership.
But there are some things that just suck.
The concept of the cobbler’s children go barefoot very much applies here. Since there is no rush to do things to fix your home, not the same way there is for your tenant’s home if you’re a good landlord, a lot of times necessary home projects just don’t happen, or take a long time to happen.
My kids have been asking me to paint the walls in our home again since they are grimey and gross, and we decided to tackle that home project this summer.
But before painting the walls of our home, we first needed to fix water damage that happened on our ceiling and walls.
We have tenants who live upstairs from us, and there were a few times that there were leaks in the bathrooms that seeped down into my home.
Once the water dried, and it no longer was “raining” in my house, after the plumber fixed the source of the leak and fixed the floor so water wouldn’t leak through the floor and then through our ceiling…
Then we had to deal with the aftermath. And since it happened more than once, and in more than one bathroom, we had these ugly patches in the ceiling of peeling and bubbled paint, in many cases down to the cement layer under it.
The first step we needed to do to take care of it was scrape off the peeling and bubbling paint. I didn’t think to take a picture of the water damage until after we already did the scraping. We scraped using a drywall knife until there were no more cracked or peeling parts.
Once that was done, we sanded down the area so there were no rough edges.
We then took a bunch of spackle and filled in the holes left behind by the peeling paint.
When I was in the store, the woman working behind the counter gave me the option between prepared spackle and powdered spackle. Knowing the difference in price, I chose the powdered. You just need to mix it with water. “You want it the texture of hummus,” she tells me. “Not tahini.” Easy as pie. I just used a disposable container to mix the spackle.
In some layers it needed to be thicker, like where the paint was gone down to the cement layer, and in other areas a thinner layer. Once the spackle was in the holes, we then used the joint compound knife to spread it as flat as possible so it would be the same level as the ceiling, so that when we painted it, it would be unnoticeable.
We needed to do this, unfortunately, in about 4 or 5 places on the ceiling of our living room/dining room/kitchen. Yes, there were that many leaks over the years. Yes, it has been very frustrating.
In addition to the ceiling, there were areas with bubbled or cracked paint on our walls. In many places, it was from water damage as well, this time sometimes from outside walls that weren’t waterproofed enough, and other times it was from the water damage from my tenant’s apartment as well.
Then there were the areas that had unexplained cracking or peeling of paint, like this wall. I have no idea why it was, but this paint was cracked and peeling so badly that each time we’d scrape off some of the loose paint with the joint compound knife, we’d discover more and more loose paint until nearly the entire bottom third of that section of wall was peeled.
In this instance, we didn’t fill the entire area with spackle since that would have been excessive.
Instead, we spread it along the edges of where the paint was no longer peeling, so that there wouldn’t be a sharp bump and difference in level between the old paint and the new paint jobs.
Here’s what the spackle looks like after being spread.
And now, it is time to let it dry. Once dried it will be sanded and then painted.
To be continued in the next post.
