A ceiling RE-Vamp

Back in the summer of 2010 my wonderful sister and I were hanging out at my house because she had a pinched nerve in her back and couldn't go to work.  She was lounging at my house watching movies and taking it easy when she looked up at my ceiling (see picture below) and said..."lets take those tiles down".

"Okay" I thought and I started pulling them down...one by one they came down and I was so excited to finally be getting rid of the hospital/office looking ceiling tiles.  Only after they were all down we were left with this. 

...and it was much worse.  After the big reveal, she said..."man that's gonna be hard to fix!...thanks sister, you were not so "wonderful" at that point :).

Those dots you see are actually some kind of black glue from who knows what led infested year, and they are rock solid.  The only way they were coming down was with a high power sander that I feared would spray lead dust everywhere.  Well, we lived with those dots for a good year while I looked and looked for a solution to the dot dilemma.  I just didn't know how we were going to get rid of them;  I thought about painting them but decided you would still be able to see the outline of them and that would just be tacky.  Finally I found these styrofoam ceiling tiles online and knew they were the answer.  Especially since they were only about $3.50 per tile as opposed to $15+ for metal ones.  A click of a button and 5 days later they were on my doorstep.

Now came problem #2, getting them up.  It wasn't that hard but it was labor intensive since our hands were up over our heads and we had a little over 100 to install, oh and by this time I was in my late 2nd/early 3rd trimester of pregnancy so I wasn't much help.  Luckily my wonderful husband plus brother-in-law and sister-in-law came to the rescue and put them up.  We applied them with a thin coat of tile mortar and the result is this...

 

It looks so so much more better than those horrible hospital grade tiles and so so so much better than those black tar dots.

Here is a side by side before/after view...