Painting My Ridiculous Living Room Ceiling
So this is done now and thanks to Mark in Norman 2 for shaming me into DIYing it. I have this weird inverted layer cake of a ceiling in my living room. It’s definitely memorable, but also definitely too high to reach entirely with a ladder. Here’s what I was able to do it using just my 8′ ladder.
In case it’s unclear what’s going on, we’re trying to get rid of the yellow.
Anyway, getting the job actually done required me to rent scaffolding. I went to the rental place just down Highway 9 from here and told the guy I needed scaffolding high enough to reach a 15-foot ceiling (it’s probably more like 14 feet, but whatever). He then got me set up with a bunch of scaffolding that we stuffed into the bed of ol’ Epimetheus. I did get some very useful tips from the guy that rented the scaffolding to me. 
If that looks like a lot of scaffolding, well — it turns out that when I told the guy that I needed to paint a 15-foot ceiling, he figured he needed to rent me enough scaffolding so that I could stand 15 feet above the ground.
Once I got it all home and after watching the first four minutes of a YouTube video on how to assemble scaffolding, I assembled the scaffolding. It took maybe 20 minutes. When I was done it looked like this.
There were still another four yellow things that I didn’t use. Plus a bunch of safety restraints, which — I’m not sure how you put up enough scaffolding AND safety restraints AND stay below a ceiling if you use the safety restraints. Long story short, I never did fall off the scaffolding.
It was actually kind of fun climbing up the scaffolding and doing the painting. A little bit of a hassle having to maneuver it around the ceiling fan, although it turns out the ceiling fan can be pushed around a lot. It was just a relief to have finally painted the ceiling after saying for years that I’ll get round to it.
Once completed, I had a living room ceiling that looked like this.
I then disassembled the scaffolding, took it back to the rental place, and was able to live happily ever after.
bkd