The house I bought is a century-old home with original plaster walls that I am determined to preserve. For the most part, the plaster is in great shape. The exception was our dining room.

For some reason, previous owners had decided to apply the most awful texturing in the dining room. Some areas looked as if a madman threw spackling at the wall and mashed it around with a sponge. In other areas, the previous owners attempted a fake brick texture. Whoever made the brick texture drew crooked mortar lines in the wet spackle with a finger. The result was “bricks” that leaned every which way. Each fake mortar line was punctuated with a perfect fingerprint.

The texture had to go, and it had to go quickly. It was late October by the time I decided to do something about it, and I wanted the dining room to be in great shape for Thanksgiving.

Friday: A Monster in the Making

I thought we were ready. I had tried various methods to remove the texture. Since the power sander seemed to work better than scrapers or any other tool, I borrowed a second sander from a friend. I also purchased a few rolls of plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal the dining room off from the rest of the house. My husband took a day off from work to give us a head start, and by 7 a.m., we were hard at work sanding.

We made great progress for a while, but problems became apparent when we stopped to eat lunch. As I took down the plastic separating us from the kitchen, I realized that most of the kitchen was coated in a thin film of white dust. We took down the sheeting in the rest of the doorways and found that dust had managed to filter throughout the whole house.

The dust wasn't anything a good vacuuming couldn't fix, but we knew it would get worse. We went around the house, stuffing rolled towels in every doorway and shutting them tight to block whatever dust made it around the plastic barriers. We also made sure that the plastic was thoroughly taped to door frames and floors, and went back to work.

Around 6 in the evening, we stopped for another break. The dust was so thick in the dining room that I could barely see my husband, even though I was standing just a couple of feet away from him. We waited for it to settle before taking the plastic barriers down.

Once we got through, disaster awaited us. The extra effort put into sealing all the doorways had done nothing at all. Everything — including the dishes in the kitchen cabinets and the clothes hanging in our closets — was covered in a thick layer of dust.

As far as we could see, there was nothing to do but press on. By that point, adding more dust to the problem wasn't going to make any difference during the cleanup process. We were dangerously low on sandpaper, and there was no hope of making dinner in that filthy kitchen, so I went to town for supplies and enough pizza to get us through the weekend.

Around midnight, we were converging on the final wall. With a large bay window and paneled wainscoting, this wall had far less textured surface area, so we felt like the end was near. In fact, the end was much nearer than I had imagined.

Whatever paint the previous owners had used on this wall was some kind of gluey abomination. The instant we touched the sanders to the paint, the sandpaper clogged. My husband and I burned through several sheets of sandpaper, but all we managed were two small smeared patches in the paint. All we wanted was to finish the sanding once and for all, but when the paint started to melt and smoke underneath the sanders, we quit. My husband stomped off to take a shower while I stripped our bed of its filthy sheets and blankets.

Saturday and Sunday: Disaster Recovery

Saturday morning, as we sat on the porch eating cold pizza, we discussed our options. Tearing down that last wall was the only way I could see to rid ourselves of that nasty texture. Since the house was already a mess, I wanted to get a sledgehammer and get started immediately.

My husband, fortunately, isn't as hasty I am, and he has an unbreakable stubborn streak. He insisted that if we ever wanted a clean house again, the cleaning had to start right now. I argued and wheedled, but he wasn't budging, so we started the cleanup. With two vacuums, we spent 10 solid hours cleaning up dust, taking breaks only to munch on cold pizza, clean clogged filters, and haul laundry to the growing pile in the basement laundry room.

On Sunday, we started washing everything. Ceilings, walls and floors, dishes, upholstery — nothing escaped our brushes and sponges. I kept the washer and dryer running nonstop, first for clothes, then towels, and finally bedding and curtains. It was late on Sunday night before we could finally claim that the house was clean.

Monday: A Remodeling Breakthrough

Monday morning rolled around, and my husband was getting ready for work. He begged and pleaded with me to leave the last wall alone until we had a solid plan. “I'm not ready for another mess,” he said. “Please, can we just wait?” I smiled and nodded and waited for him to leave.

Half an hour after he left, I was standing in the dining room, studying the wall, a pile of tools at my feet. I knew I couldn't tear down the wall without sparking a fight, but that didn't mean I couldn't experiment just a little.

The “Eureka!” moment came late in the afternoon. I realized that even though the paint was impervious to almost everything, the spackling underneath wasn't. I used a sharp knife to make a long gouge in the paint and started sponging water into it. After a few minutes, the spackling underneath turned soft, and the paint started to bubble. I worked a scraper into the gouge and peeled away a big, beautiful section of paint and texture.

When my husband got home, there were smears of wet spackle all over the dining room floor, and piles of paint chips that I had swept out of my way. He rolled his eyes. At least I hadn't destroyed the entire house this time. His mood didn't improve once he discovered that it had only taken me about an hour to soak and scrape that last wall.

If Only I Could Take Back the Dust

Even though most of the cleanup was complete on Sunday, there were still remnants of dust. I spent the entire next week doing laundry. I also had to sort through all the food in our cabinets and throw away anything that didn't have a perfect seal – things like open boxes of cereal or crackers. The dust was so pervasive that it had even filtered into unopened boxes of noodles.

To this day, two years later, we are still finding dust from the dining room project. About a month ago, I took down some trim in the breakfast nook. When I pried the baseboards free, the void between the trim and the wall was packed with white powder. I wish fervently that I had discovered the water trick before we did all that sanding.

Look Before You Leap

The biggest lesson I learned was that home improvement projects should never be taken lightly. As the saying goes, “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong.” From years of working as a renovator, I knew this — to an extent. However, I had never been involved in a project that gone so spectacularly wrong.

I also discovered that there is almost always a better way to approach a project. If I had put more time and effort into experimenting and researching before diving headlong into the dining room project, I might have discovered that soaking the texture off was the thing to do. Since I'm an impatient sort, it drives me crazy to spend time planning when I could be working. In this case, had I stopped to think about the project for a few days, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time, mess, and stress.