Hard at work

This is the store in all its gutted glory. The original store space had pegboard on all the walls, old carpet on the floor, and popcorn ceilings. We immediately ripped out most of the pegboard and the carpet, but the lovely popcorn ceiling finish was a dilemma. Having just dealt with that issue at our house in Dallas, we knew that we had to come up with an inventive solution to cover it rather than scraping it off. (It's a nasty job, believe me.) We toyed with doing tin ceiling tiles (too expensive) and slatted wood (expensive and time consuming), but our final decision was to put old doors on the ceiling. So....we painted the popcorn dark brown so it would recede into nothingness, and bought 57 doors of varying sizes and degrees of disintegration.

Note that I just mentioned "time consuming" in eliminating another ceiling treatment. It turns out that getting the doors suitably aged but not filthy and falling apart is a very very labor intensive operation. First we blew the initial dirt off with an air hose, then went over them all with steel wool, then vacuumed the dust off. That process worked on a few of the doors. The others had to be stripped, sanded and painted, then we'll apply a crackle medium. After that, we paint again and clear coat with a sealer.

We're still debating how to attach the doors. I initially imagined chains holding the doors about 8" from the ceiling, with lights hanging down through the areas where glass or screen had been. However, there's some concern about stability, so it's back to the drawing board.

So much for the doors. We're going to put whitewashed barnwood on the walls and paint the wood floors in a large checkerboard pattern.