New Ceiling

We really haven't been left a whole month with a big hole in our ceiling, I just didn't get around to posting an update. You may recall that when last we visited the bathroom, the pipe was fixed but the ceiling looked like this. We were understandably eager to get rid of the giant hole.

Well it was definitely one of those instances where things have to get worse before they get better. So much of the drywall was damp and swollen that the handyman said it made more sense to just remove the whole ceiling. It's not a very big room, after all. He also did the ceiling inside the shower stall as well, It didn't suffer any damage from the leak but it had always had a strange paint bubble that couldn't really be fixed, potentially due to some old water damage. So one day into the repair (and after removing everything from the room like curtains, towels, shelves, wall hangings, etc, here was the view:

The next day, it already looked much better:

After that came four days of quick visits by the handyman for layer upon layer of skim coating and priming. It was good confirmation that no matter how skilled you are at drywall installation, there are no ways to take shortcuts on this step Also based on the time each layer took, it confirmed for me that we made the right choice in hiring someone else.

The progress made through al the skim coating days seemed so negligible that we didn't take incremental photos. After a few days of that and two layers of paint, we were back in business. Well, sort of. Not pictured is the full 2-3 hours I spent in that tiny room cleaning all the drywall dust and debris from every ledge, crevice, and grout line. But then it was finally time to move the things back in. As good as new. Kind of crazy that after all that, the best we could hope for was that it looked the same as it did before. Guess that's the nature of a repair compared to a remodel. The paint bubbles are gone at least, and the ceiling is nice and smooth.

I never did get a before picture, but above this light is where the paint bubble has been since we first painted in 2009.

And here is the view inside the shower stall, also bubble-free.

A note about the paint. When we painted, we used Sherwin Williams in Grand Canal. We still had some of the original can. Our handyman preferred Benjamin Moore so he took our can, with the color composition, over to be paint matched. It really does look the same, so either he did an excellent job painting, or they truly were mostly identical (at least enough to cover one up with the other invisibly).

As I'm writing this post, I'm realizing that he never told us what the ceiling paint was. When he asked for our preferences, we simply said we didn't want optic white out of the can (like we mistakenly had used the previous time). But he didn't leave us the can so I probably ought to send him a message and find out what it was, just in case.

Edited to add in the paint color for the ceiling: Benjamin Moore Regal Select, eggshell finish in Brilliant White (if I'm reading the label correctly).

Hopefully that's the last we hear from our pipes for a while...