Sheetrock Gothic

Never be afraid to try a brave new look!  I have to say, this is merely an encore from fall 2006, when I looked like this for about two months straight, while I was blasting every square inch of my house with an orbital sander.

This time, I’m simply repairing the holes in my living-room ceiling, a task whose duration can be blamed purely on procrastination - there really ain’t no other excuse.  Except that I was dreading the mess.  And I hate to vacuum.  And I wasn’t confident I could do it perfectly therefore discouraged myself in advance. 

Never mind that the rest of the ceiling looks like it will fall down any second (sanding helped, but there’s only so much you can do).  Most of the old seams are visible and bumpy, despite the sanding.  Therefore, I decided not to cut out the entire piece of sheetrock, because I didn’t want to mess with matching up the bumpy seams. 

I just used a saw and x-acto knife to square up the holes (one about 2×3, one about 1×2), then put scraps of plywood behind each hole (actually, we put the plywood up immediately after the Fall, as an emergency measure).  Put screws around the perimeter of the hole, to attach the plywood to the sheetrock.  Then attached the new patches to the plywood.

Then applied joint compound.  And joint compound.  And joint compound.  There are so many layers of paint on this ceiling that the patches looked like the wrong thickness!  But all is well…

Or, should I say, it’s well enough.  I deleted several photos because the patches showed.  Grrr.  But, truly, if you were trying to spot the patches, you would say, “Is that it?”  And I’d say, “No, that’s the sagging seam.”  “Well, what about THAT?”  No, that’s another sagging seam.”  Etc.  

Still, it’s going to drive me crazy.