First order of business: you guys are the best. I truly felt like garbage about everything going on with the house when I wrote the post about my roofing woes last week, and half-jokingly solicited some consolation in the form of your renovation horror stories, and you wonderful creatures came out in the comments in force and delivered! Knowing that so many people have been in the same boat (and, often, worse boats) and reading all about it really made me feel better. Perhaps that speaks to something unsavory about my schadenfreude-istic personality, but the fact that you all lived to tell the tale was truly heartening. Hugs all around! We hopefully have a wonderful contractor starting work this week on the gutters (!), and along with getting some exciting electrical work done this week (!!!) and our heating system up and running (!!!!!), things are looking up again. Updates forthcoming!
Second order of business: after I pledged to let some qualified pros handle the roof, I started in on another little room because that’s just how I do. Nobody puts Baby in a corner. Except maybe box gutters. And when box gutters put Baby in a corner, Baby finds another corner. This corner:
What corner am I in? Funny you should ask. I’m in that tiny room upstairs that I generally refer to as “that creepy closet with the creepy closet in it.”
I’m not sure exactly what this room was originally (maid’s quarters? dressing room? sewing room? nursery?), but I do know that it’s tiny and weird and full of potential.
It has a wonderfully large south-facing window and gets terrific light.
After I pulled out and disposed of the several layers of old linoleum (keeping it wet and wearing a mask, lest the backing contained asbestos), I was left with basically a blank space. Unlike the larger rooms in our house, this one just has the original pine tongue-and-groove subfloor, which I LOVE. It’s already painted, too, so I don’t have to feel even a little guilty about painting it again.
I like the idea of making the room a little office mostly because it’s so compact and secluded from the rest of the house. I don’t really like to work in large public spaces because I’m easily distracted, so I’ll be better off keeping myself cooped up in here where I can’t stare at the other gajillion things I need to fix on the house. I want it to be bright and happy and minimal and cozy and pretty. It’s going to be great!
Looks like a totally fun and pretty easy little weekend job, right? Wrong.
Like pretty much every other wall in our house, this one was originally covered in wallpaper, which is now very old wallpaper clinging to the plaster with very old adhesive, covered in layers and layers of paint. Over time (and over the course of the house freezing into a block of ice for two winters when it was vacant) that ancient wallpaper adhesive has mostly failed, causing the wallpaper and layers of paint on top if it to separate from the plaster walls. Everything you see in this picture came off the walls with a simple scrape of a spackle knife——no special products or even steam! The problem with scraping off any extra-loose areas, patching, and just repainting the whole thing is that over time more problem areas will inevitably develop. Even though it feels like I’m totally destroying a perfectly decent-looking room (which is partially the fault of these bad pictures, which mask a lot of the in-person flaws), it’ll be much better off in the long run if I do this stuff NOW and do it thoroughly and correctly. On top of the wallpaper/paint thing, the underlying plaster is also failing and cracked in a few places, so I can do a much more thorough repair job if the walls are stripped down and bare.
On top if that, it feels kind of nice to strip all this garbage off the walls before adding a skim coat and a fresh coat of paint. The picture on the right shows what the corners of the room are “constructed” out of: masking tape! I wasn’t kidding when I’ve mentioned that there is masking tape EVERYWHERE in this house, including under layers of wallpaper and paint. It appears that instead of fixing cracks in the corners of the plaster walls, a previous owner just decided to tape over them and cover it all up. While I admire the ingenuity, it’s not exactly a solution built to stand the test of time.
I know this room might seem totally inconsequential and like it should be last on the agenda, but I wanted to get to it now for a couple of reasons:
1. I’d really like to have a place to work. When so much of the house feels like complete and utter chaos, I’m really excited to have this little space done and polished to escape from it all when need be. I’m HORRENDOUS about blogging/answering email/writing/functioning generally when I’m at the house, so having a designated location to take a break and do that stuff is going to be pretty awesome.
2. Because this is a small space that isn’t that important, it’s a good place to practice all this stuff. I’ve never skim-coated a wall before or done any real plaster repair, so before I try to take on the entire entryway that basically spans two floors, the entire length of the house, and a stairwell, I think the time it will take to fix the walls in this room will be we well-spent in the long run when I take on more extensive and larger scale repairs.
BOOM—progress? If you look closely at the image on the right, you can see a bunch of plaster buttons securing crumbly plaster to the wall, some new drywall where the old plaster really couldn’t be salvaged (largely due to previous bad repairs) and the beginnings of some fancy Old Town Home-style skim coating with the help of fiberglass mesh screens! Trying all of this stuff for the first time, I’m really glad I’m giving myself this test run on this room before moving on to the more public/high-traffic/important areas. I won’t lie, it’s going to take some practice. But after spending so long on the roof trying to fix my crazy gutters, all this stuff that I probably would have been hating now feels like super fun and manageable child’s play!
I’m SO excited to get to the point where I can prime and paint these walls. They’re pretty much entirely stripped of the old wallpaper and paint at this point (I wore a heavy-duty dust mask throughout to avoid lead paint that may be lurking a few layers of paint deep…), so now it’s time to scrub them down to get rid of the paste residue and start repairing! Joint compound and I are going to be best friends——I can feel it.