Have you ever wondered why anyone ever bothered to splatter tiny bits of mud all over your ceiling?

I occasionally look up at the bespeckled mess and wonder if perhaps I should scrape it all off. Particularly in those places where I have removed walls, there are obvious signs of trauma. I have tried to sort of patch up those locations, but the way the stuff is originally applied usually makes it denser at the edges, since the guy doing it is trying to get right into the corner. Thin field, thick edge means that, when you remove the wall adjacent to the edge, the result is a ridged outline of where the wall used to be.

But I look at it in general every now and then and wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea. I know that it hides defects, but it does it my covering the ceiling with a million defects. It’s not like sweeping your dirt under your rug, it’s like burying the dirt on your floor under a few wheelbarrow loads of fresh dirt.

But you get so used to seeing such things, the mind becomes immune to their appearance. There are so many examples of such mind-numbing ubiquitous masquerades, I can’t even think of one.

That may seem a bit extreme.

Above: This is where I took down a wall in my kitchen and I just quickly mopped on a bit of drywall compount in the empty area. You can see the thick edge on the left where the spackle was applied heavily in the corner. The proper way to patch this would be to strip back and then refill the area with the same material. Or plaster-covered spitballs, if you can make enough.

Anyway, while standing around talking to a painter at work a couple of weeks ago, a third guy came up and mentioned that he needed to paint the ceiling of his living room. The painter told him he could do it for him, for free, if the guy prepared the room. I told him to do it with a roller but to make sure not to do the normal back-and-forth rolling, since that usually peels large patches of that stuff off. I encouraged him to take up the offer.

The guy looked pleased about the offer of a free paint job but looked dismayed when the painter told him he’d need everything draped in plastic, taped to the top corner of all the walls, right to the centre of the room. The painter’s plan was to bring in his sprayer and be done in less than five minutes.

I bet he didn’t do it.

Of course, there are many options other than this bird-scat-spattered ceiling finish. When I was a kid, I lived next to a house that, from the outside, looked like a shack. The inside, for the most part, was not much better. It was almost a hundred years old at the time and, other than surface-mount electrical, still had only what you’d find in a house from the end of the nineteenth century. Anyway, the ceiling was interesting, since it was covered with tin panels.

Tin panels were made to mimic more expensive and labour-intensive plaster jobs. I thought they looked very interesting, and very out-of-place in that house, when I was a kid.

Of course, tin panels cost a lot of money. And the look they give is not necessarily something you’d prefer over the inverted gravel bed finish of the spackle.

They do fit very nicely, though, in a certain bookstore with a very high ceiling. I went into a store in a different town and was immediately struck by the fact that the ceiling was fourteen feet high and covered with those panels. Further examination showed the store was only one third of the original space, since the panels (and high ceiling) were in the two stores next door.

The last store had plain painted drywall everywhere and it made the panels look stupid.

In that store, they should have splattered spackle all over the panels to match the smooth, featureless walls.

It’s a matter of what you’re used to seeing, I think.