kiwords

I spent New Year’s Eve day with Clay, working on our house.

Heh. Our house. *grin*

Anyhow, we spent the day removing popcorn from the ceilings. Now, up until this point I have not had any sort of an opinion on the subject of popcorn ceilings. It’s just how most ceilings come, you know? And yes, it’s annoying when cobwebs gather in the corners of the walls and the duster, instead of sweeping them away, presses them into the bumps and divots of the popcorn. It just never occurred to me it could be anything different. So when Clay insisted he preferred popcorn-free ceilings, I shrugged and agreed. I was pleased to find a project at the house I could actually help with. Framing walls in the basement? I was no use there. Cutting through the concrete to make a hole for the new window in the basement? Not so much. Removing the old shower stall and installing the new, gorgeous deep bathtub? Useless to help, unless you count climbing into the newly positioned tub, imagining how deep the water will be, and struggling mightily to keep my clothes on. Rrrrowlll.

Where was I? Ah yes, popcorn – a project I could actually help with! Yay me! I arrived bright and early Saturday morning (10 AM), ratty jeans and t-shirt on, ready for the task at hand. Truth be told, I was a little nervous. I don’t mind doing odd jobs around the house, I even consider myself fairly handy. But Clay is the real deal when it comes to home improvement. He wires things and builds things and owns tools that I don’t even know the name for. I didn’t want to get in his way.

A large part of the job was getting ready for the job. Everything had to be removed from the rooms we were working on or covered in plastic. I set to taping down yards of slippery plastic on the floor while Clay took down light fixtures and the like. Eventually we moved onto the actual popcorn removal.

We sprayed the ceiling with warm water, then scraped off the popcorn with large flat blades. When it was wet enough, the stuff came off in large, satisfying sheets. When it’s scraped free, it feels like paper mache, and it rained down on our hair, our clothes, our ladders, everything. We talked and talked and sometimes I would laugh until I had to lean over, elbows on the ladder, feeling the metal lines and soft, damp lumps of ceiling popcorn under my skin

We not only enjoyed ourselves, we were an efficient team. Even with a break for lunch, it was soon over, and we folded up the protective sheets and stuffed the heavy wads of plastic and popcorn into trash cans. I flicked dust out of my hair and off my shoulders for a few minutes before giving it up as a hopeless cause. Nothing short of a long, hot shower would help. Clay slid an arm around my dusty waist and looked our work with a smile of satisfaction.

“See? Doesn’t that look better?”

I leaned against him and admired the ceiling, a wide, smooth expanse of future stretching out above us in all directions.

It was beautiful.