The garage ceiling needed to be redone. It was the old popcorn finish from when the house was built. There had been two minor leaks in the roof that caused the popcorn to fall off in two places. Plus there were 40 years of accumulated changes to the lighting and other changes that had left holes and bad patches in it. We had repainted most of the walls, and redone the sink in the corner. The ceiling was next.
I could take the popcorn off, but once that is done, it needs to be re-textured and I don't have the experience or equipment to do that. So I hired it out. From the whole house repainting, Hernan Diaz of HD Paint & Home Remodeling impressed me, so I called him out for an estimate. He said $1800 and 3 days; could start in about a week. That sounded reasonable, and gave me a week to get things ready.
I moved a lot of the stuff in the garage out onto either the front porch or the back porch -- stuff like ladders and the lawn mower and anything that looked to get in the way if you wanted to work on the ceiling. And I removed the light fixtures.
The biggest problem was the grate that I had installed into the ceiling.
The original idea was that I would install a similar one right above it in the floor of the attic and air could then flow up from the garage (with the doors or window open, at least) and thru the attic and out thru the ridge vent, helping keep the attic cool. Once I got it in, however, I found that the air in the attic heated up during the day, expanded and flowed down into the garage from the attic. You could stand under the grate and feel the warm air coming down into the garage. So I removed the grate from the attic floor and sealed that off, but didn't bother doing anything with the garage grate. Now I needed to.
I removed the grate, and trimmed the hole in the sheetrock back an inch or so to expose the bottom of the ceiling joists so that I could attach a new sheet of sheetrock to them.
After a couple of days of sanding and applying sheet rock "mud", I thought I had it pretty well fixed. It didn't have to be perfect -- it was going to be textured with the rest of the ceiling.
Anyway, when HD showed up, he first went around and applied plastic to all the walls and floors.
He then used his compressor and spray gun to apply a light spray of water onto the popcorn ceiling, let it dry and then did it again. Doing this a couple of times, the popcorn separated from the sheetrock and fell to the floor when he scraped it off with a wide blade. He did an amazing job of removing the popcorn and leaving a ceiling in great shape.
Of course the garage doors obscure access to the ceiling above them, so they needed to be down/closed when he was working on that part of the ceiling, and the garage door opener and chain and track needed to be covered in plastic, so much of the time they were closed. With the water, and sheetrock work, and later the texture and it drying, there was a lot of water in the air. And the outside temperatures were in the high 90s at least. So it was very hot and humid in the garage, surrounded by plastic, with limited light (I had removed the light fixtures).
Once the ceiling was prepared, a light texture was applied.
That was allowed to dry overnight.
The last day was all painting. First a primer coat of Kilz to seal the sheetrock. HD wanted the original, oil-based, Kilz. It took 3 gallons. I bought that at Home Depot ($107.10). Next came 2 coats of the final paint -- Heavy Cream again, is what we are using for ceilings. For this I picked Behr Marquee Interior Satin, 5 gallons. $272.
The result? A beautiful ceiling. Both the front of the garage
and the back of the garage
look amazing! I was so pleased with HD's work that I paid him $2000 instead of the agreed upon $1800.
Of course, that was just for the painting of the ceiling, I still had to restore the garage to working order. The main part of that was the lights. I replaced the three lights with new light fixtures -- LED strips, from Home Depot. The two over the cars are from Lithonia Lighting, MNSS 4 ft. 120-Watt Equivalent Integrated LED White Strip Light Fixture 4000K High Output, Model # MNSS L48 7000LM MVOLT GZ10 40K. These put out a lot of light -- 7000 Lumens. Each. About twice as much light as the previous lights. 2 at $54.97 = $109.94.
Installing them was a bit of a trick. From the package, I first removed the plastic cover and then the metal piece holding the lights. That piece was attached to the back by a grounding wire and the wires to the LED driver (looks like a small transformer). Both of these were removed by removing a screw each. Separating the top from the bottom. That makes it fairly easy to install the bottom onto the ceiling, with the light power supply wires coming thru a knock-out hole.
Once the bottom of the light is firmly attached to the ceiling, the fairly lightweight top part can be reattached by screwing back in the grounding wire and the LED driver. These will support the top piece while the power supply wires are attached to the light fixture -- black to black, white to white, and bare copper ground to green.
And then the top can be snapped back onto the bottom; careful not to pinch any of the wires. And the top plastic cover can be put back over the LED strip to produce the installed light.
Turning the circuit breaker back on, we can test it, and it works!
We repeat the same for the second light fixture, over the other car.
Back over the workshop area, we do the same but use a slightly lower output fixture. It looks exactly the same but is only 5500 lumens. Model # MNSS L48 5500LM MVOLT GZ10 40K. $49.97.
