Christmas Hiatus

Between busy holiday plans and the whole family getting sick right before Christmas, our house renovation slowed down quite a bit.

In my last post at the end of November, my sister and Luke's brother had helped us get the whole main floor painted. (Thank you!) But, we ran into a major issue. Removing the walls around the staircase and the areas around our new pantry left seams on the ceiling that had to be patched.

(Sorry for the blurry picture, but you get the idea)

We spent hours -- no, days -- patching, mudding, and sanding those seams. Luke meticulously matched the ceiling texture and before we painted, it was looking pretty good. After the paint though...not so much. The seams were undeniably noticeable. It was a huge setback and we started brainstorming.
Option 1: Leave it and hope no one noticed. (Not really an option in my opinion...)
Option 2: We could try it again, which meant days and days of sanding, mudding, texturing etc, with no guarantee that the seams would actually disappear.
Option 3: Hire out a professional
Option 4: Cover it up with a new ceiling treatment

Option 3 was looking to be pretty expensive because we had so many areas that needed work and for the same amount of money we could install a new ceiling and get rid of the dated textured ceiling that we both hated anyway. Not to mention that when we took out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, we found out that the ceiling texture was different in the two rooms.

So, after lots of discussion, we decided to do option 4. I've always loved the look of coffered ceilings:

Source

But, our ceilings are a standard 8 feet, so giving up that much ceiling room wasn't an option. But I have seen something called a flat coffered ceiling that could work really well. Something like this:

Source

So, December was spent planning and prepping for this ceiling treatment. I can't wait until it is is done -- it is going to look so much better that the old textured one! I'm actually pretty glad that patching the ceiling didn't turn out -- chalk this one up to a 'happy accident'.