Brooke here:

The thrill of owning a semi-historic home has Officially Worn Off.  I didn’t have a watch on hand so I can’t tell you the precise second that it happened, but I do know it was at some point during the third attempt to spackle my office ceiling.

The past three days have been nothing but spackle, sand, paint…  spackle, sand, paint…  spackle, sand, paint… and each pass shrinks the damaged area only slightly. I took a razor and did a four-corner scrape job on each hole to get rid of the peeling paint, then used the best dry vinyl spackle (with primer) I could find to fill in the holes.  Once the spackle was dry, I used a brush pad to lightly cover the exposed areas with ceiling paint.  The pad had so little moisture on it that I was basically drybrushing the color on, which was done multiple times over several hours.

The end result is a lumpy disgusting mess.  Honestly, I should tear down the entire ceiling and prime it but the room has to be done by tomorrow and I just don’t have the time.

On the progress side, Elizabeth painted the main room:

She had the entire project done in a couple of hours and these pictures don’t do it justice.  The room looks… healthier.  I was dreading doing this room because the wall texture is very odd; Elizabeth thinks that the walls were once coated in a popcorn ceiling finish that’s been painted several times, while my best guess is that someone removed wallpaper and didn’t bother to strip the glue before painting over it.  Whatever the case, the walls are just plain wacky and would be in terrible shape if the texture didn’t disguise the holes, the caulk, and the layers and layers of unsanded spackle.  As it turned out, the color and the texture work well together and you’d have to go looking for problems to find them. And the color brings the fireplace out, and that fireplace is wonderful…

Okay, maybe the thrill isn’t completely gone.