the sky is falling...

actually more like the ceiling. You may recall a few months ago, I posted pics of our sunroom and you voted to pick a color for us to paint the room. We used our lovely home depot gift card and got all the supplies then realized it was the dead of winter and we'd have ventillation problems. So alas, last week was gorgeous and so our sunroom project finally began and almost got ruined! ):
This is what our ceiling looked like before we started painting, just the basic popcorn style. Our entire house has this for ceilings.

When we started painting, this happened.


Yikes! We'd painted other ceilings in the house with no problems. We didn't know what to do so we started to scrape the ceiling.

We then realized that this was really messy and would take a long time. So hubs went to home depot to find out our options. We learned that you can't paint popcorn ceilings with water-based paint. Apparently the previous homeowners must have known this and had already painted some of the other ceilings in the house. The shocker to us is that obviously the sunroom had never been repainted and that room was an addition onto the house but is a good 25+ years old. Ew.
Because we'd already started to scrape off the popcorn finish which was falling off anyway, some of the ceiling was smooth and the rest wasn't. Had we known about the problem we would have just used oil-based paint and we would have been done. So our solution was to paint the rest of the ceiling with oil-based paint and then wait for it to dry overnight and then apply a new plaster finish to the ceiling. You have to do the first coat and let it dry for 4 hours and then do the second decorative finish. We decided to use an old broom and do a sweep like finish in a random pattern and since the ceiling was originally popcorn finish, that also shows through. Overall, we like it, it's not too drastically different from the rest of the house but at least it's got some variation and it's fresh and clean! And I'm also sharing in case any of you decide to paint a popcorn ceiling. USE OIL BASED PAINT!!
After 2 days of hard work.