Our master bedroom remodel is what I like to call our ‘Might As Well’ project. It started off simply, then turned into “Well, we’ve done this much, we MIGHT AS WELL do” this too!

I am dividing the remodel into two parts because it was such a large project.

Things you will see:

• painting walls
• removing carpet
• sealing floors with paint
• taking off popcorn ceilings
• installing wood floors
• sheet rock
• shelf building

All in all, our master bedroom remodel cost us about $800 dollars. Most of that budget went into the flooring.

First we removed all furniture and decor from our bedroom. This left us with our nasty, original-to-the-home carpet. I took a photo of it, but I refuse to post it because it was so much grosser than I originally thought. You will see by the padding how bad it was.

To take out the carpeting, we used box cutter blades to cut the carpet into manageable sections then rolled them up and threw them out. Yuck.

Next was the insanely tedious task of taking out all the leftover staples that were left behind from the padding.

Once that was done, we took some cheap, white, latex paint to seal the floors with.

In these photos you will see that we went ahead and repainted our walls! At this point in the remodel, I thought we were just repainting & re-flooring. However, if you decide to de-popcorn your ceilings, do NOT paint your walls until finished.

Our next ‘might as well’ was our bathroom vanity. We hated it & my in-laws had a pretty vanity that they no longer wanted – “might as well replace it!”

We removed the caulking and tore out the vanity with a crowbar. THEN we found that the sheet rock behind it was filled with moisture. So, we cut a straight-ish line and tore out the lower part of the wall.

We took another trip to Lowe’s to get the ‘blue board’ sheet rock (the kind meant for bathrooms) and gave a call to our plumber friend to upgrade our plumbing. Then, we replaced the sheet rock, spackled, and sanded smooth once dry.

“Well, we’ve done this much and we hate popcorn ceilings, so we MIGHT AS WELL remove those too!”

We started in the bathroom section. First, we took a hand-pumped sprayer and thoroughly wet the ceiling with water. Then, we took scrapers and scraped the popcorn off. (While we were up there with scrapers, we took off the wallpaper border too for painting)

Pretty easy, even it was messy. Our thoughts were: this is awesome & this is gonna be a breeze!

For a full tutorial, go here.

Then we got to the bedroom. NOT so awesome and easy! Apparently, if the ceiling is painted underneath the popcorn, it is a lot harder to scrape off.

We had a hell of time with the popcorn in our bedroom. It took us forever! And it was horribly messy. We gouged the ceiling so bad in some places that we had to take putty to them, which created even more work.

Anywho, once you have de-popcorned the ceiling, putty any gouged areas. Once dry, sand the crap out your ceiling until it is smooth. This is also a messy section. Wear masks & protective eye covering for all of this!

Now, clean, clean, clean! There is going to be dust and ceiling debris everywhere. We put down tarps to catch as much as possible, then threw those bad boys out.

The last step of the ceiling is to paint it. We used the same cheap, latex white paint we used for the floors. It took approximately two coats to cover.

That is all for part one, stayed tuned for part two which will cover painting and flooring.