Cracking Ceilings, Gromit!

We’re big fans of Wallace and Gromit around here, but what I’m about to share with you is no laughing matter.

Our ceilings are cracking:

There I said it.

Old homes are full of charm and character but also need maintenance now and again, especially when heavy machinery is digging up streets around you. The water main on our street was replaced, as well as a complete resurface of the road, all the vibrations and drilling, from the trucks and equipment, caused our ceilings to crack. Yay for new water 🙂 Ouch, for our poor ceilings ;( Literally, our house was shaking through the whole thing.

Here’s our living room all pretty with new pillows (click here if you missed that post).

Well, if I point my camera directly up at the ceiling, here’s the view:

Not as pretty as the chesterfield or the pillows, huh?

Over by my wingback chair, oh you guessed!

Large cracks.

One of Conor’s friends actually asked me, “Um, why are all your ceilings cracked?” To which I replied, “Well, it’s an old house!”

I feel like my ceilings have spider veins stretching across them – unsightly and displeasing. Who wants these???

There’s more cracking in our upstairs hallway and office.

The worst is in the boys’ rooms. You may remember that they have adjoining rooms through this faux wall.

The ceiling is completely bowing. This is a safety issue which we can no longer overlook.

Can you see it is bowing up there? It is hard to get good photos of ceilings… You should have seen me teetering on stools to take some of these. Great mental image, huh?

This is still my dream home but we need to give it a little TLC this spring and we also need some help doing this because this is WAY out of our DIY expertise. So what’s in store you ask? Well, Luke and I are getting the house ready this week. We have a Pod and we’re filling it up with furniture from the living room, dining room, office and boys’ rooms.

The ceilings need to come down and it’s going to be a messy, messy job.

You may remember when we did the guest room over, we discovered we had calcimine ceilings, click here to see how we painted them.  These ceilings are original to the house so they are lathe and horse hair plaster so dust and debris is going to go everywhere.

Andrew Fitzsimmons and his team over at Fitzsimmons Construction is helping us with this project. His team will start the demo next week. All the ceilings will come down. In the living room we plan on having some recessed lighting put in and I have a little makeover for the fireplace planned which is a DIY that I’ll be doing. The dining room will continue to have our beautiful chandelier 😉

The office ceiling is coming down and the mini chandelier will go back up in there and hopefully I can put the finishing touches on that room and do a big reveal.

I’m hoping they can blue board and plaster over the original ceiling in our hallway:

The big plans are happening in the boys’ room. They are going to get a WHOLE room makeover out of this deal. Conor is delighted, John not so much. My oldest likes things to stay as they are, he really doesn’t like change, but I feel like this is a good time to redecorate as they are growing up so quick. Can you believe they’re 10 and 6 now?

This was how John’s room was looking last year and it hasn’t changed much since then except for the state of the ceilings.

I intend to do a whole inspiration board for their room, but to give you a general idea – the faux wall is coming down. I think this will open the space up, offer more light and heat (as the heater is on Conor’s side) and be better for laying the room out – I may even do a desk area up here rather than the playroom. The ceiling is coming down completely (along with the attic insulation as it will just fall when they take the ceiling down) and we’re also going to patch up one of the doors on Conor’s side. The room is going to get new paint, a new ceiling, lights, bedding, maybe new headboards and I have a really cool idea for a wall, but I’m still in the planning stages with all of the design.

This is a really big project for us and I intend to share all the progress right here!

Have any of you at home gone through this before? If so, would love to hear!

Cracking Ceilings, Gromit!