that smell...

I had all but forgotten that distinct smell that goes along with replastering.  While the curing plaster has it's own delicious scent (the scent of progress and victory could never be called bad could it?) there's also the residual scents of demolition.  Musty rotted wood, urine soaked soaked squirrel nests, even the old plaster has a smell.  Of course, overlaid on top of those is the sweet smell of fabric softener if I've been stripping wallpaper.  All that, and there's no possible way of opening a window in this cold...

That somewhat dizzying potpourri is worth it though if that's what getting walls requires.




























The butler's pantry is about half done, all that's left is patching the old holes.  You can see just how many types of plaster we have going on - three coat will go back on the lathe where possible, blue board and wire lathe are used in spots where there's no wood lathe left, or where he'll have to taper the plaster to blend two different surfaces.  Not to mention the veneer coat on the new surfaces.

It's a process that tries my patience, as part as our heavily negotiated price, the work is getting done on weekends and on some evenings.  While this was our choice, it still manages to drive me slightly nuts.

Upstairs, my to-do list is complete.  The only wallpaper remaining is on the ceiling of the big bedroom.  Since the plaster is in hideous shape, the ceiling and slanted walls will be laminated with blue board and veneer plaster, the fantastic ceiling papers can stay to enthrall a future owner.  While they appear strikingly modern, they are the first and second layers of about 15 total, so I have no doubt they date to about 1886 and 1911 respectively (first and second owners).  While I doubt it'll ever be in my budget to have these reproduced as wallpaper, I'm hoping to have a stencil made - time I have plenty of.

A lot of people ask why laminate instead of just demoing everything fully, and there are a few reasons (as much as I'd like to preserve every fraction of an inch height wise).  First off, the existing plaster is about an inch thicker than the half inch blue board, this would leave a difficult to patch gap where the walls meet the ceilings .  Secondly, our joists and studs are only a few steps removed from being trees, wonderful for holding the house up, terrible if you're looking for a flat surface - the plaster and lathe hides these inconsistencies, blue board secured directly to the joists would not.  The fix for this is to strike a level line around the rooms and screw level nailers into the joists - costly, time consuming, and likely taking away that inch of height you were fighting to preserve.  Lastly, while veneer plaster looks and feels nice, it still has that hollowness that drywall has, securing it against the plaster walls makes it nearly indistinguishable from the original.  Oh, and one more thing, I don't need a hundred more trash bags to deal with - we're already two months out with our current collection (between ours and our neighbors houses we can get rid of about 6-8 a week - Pittsburgh doesn't have a dump).

two years

Two years seems awfully long for something I started on a whim, but yes, I've been writing this blog for two years and we've been chained to this house for over four years now.  I still can't manage to keep up with what's going on here, let alone everything we worked on before I started writing (most of that was just me running around screaming looking for the next leak, but whatever).

That said, I feel like I owe you the truth.  I've done a terrible thing.  I actually HIRED someone to do work I'm perfectly capable of doing myself.  I'm ashamed.  And overjoyed.  The last of the destroyed rooms (and then some) will be done in the next month or so by our lovely plasterer (I'll admit, I let him do the staircase ceiling two years ago).  

most of the plaster under that wallpaper was missing or rotted out

That plastic sheet was one of many water funneling
devices designed to get water down the stairs

50's (?) era plaster board that had never even been finished,
which illustrates how long our house has been derelict

These include the two biggest bedrooms on the third floor, the recently opened up butler's pantry, and maybe the back of the laundry room if we have enough materials left over.  The reality is that I taught myself how to do three coat and veneer plaster when we bought the house, and I did all of the work on the first and second floors.  We lied to the bank and told them the third floor was "just attic," and convinced them not to force us to finish it before closing out the 203k loan we were required to have to get a mortgage.  There was simply not enough time or money to have done the work up here in the 9 month time frame the bank gave us.  

Three years later, the thought of doing two more destroyed rooms brings me near tears, and while I did a bunch of smaller plastering jobs on the third floor over the past year, I haven't been able to bring myself to start in those rooms.  So our house has been wide open, bags of insulation for the attic have filled up two rooms since the first winter we've lived here (you can't blow in insulation when you have no ceilings as I keep having to remind people), my white cat is brown from sleeping in the sooty eave spaces and our house is an uncleanable dust bowl.  

In addition to not having to do the plastering myself, lets face it, not having to carry 27 sheets of blueboard and many 50 pound bags of plaster up to the third floor is worth paying for.  Even better, I'm not the one that will be cleaning plaster buckets in arctic temperatures.  

I'll be scraping the last of the wallpaper, washing the walls we're patching, and doing the last bits of demo, insulating and adding nailers over the next few days while the plasterer finishes up the butler's pantry.  Too bad we didn't have this all done a few weeks ago before the sub-zero temps moved in.  Better late than never I suppose.  It just means I'll be spending the first weeks of good weather insulating a pitch black attic instead of playing in the dirt and sunshine.  

the wall goes...

It took a week to decide, but the butler's pantry wall eventually came down...

wide open spaces now

We took the time to find a door that would fit the opening, and tested various pocket door rollers, but time had mangled the whole thing too much for it to function as it was built.  If there had been more indications that it was original to the space we would have reframed the pocket door track with modern hardware, but everything looked suspicious.

As it turns out, we were right, the track contraption was put together with shiny wire nails, not the iron square nails that should have been there.  There was also lathe on the adjoining wall (behind where the wall we demoed met it), so all in all, no guilt.  I'm sure something would have been in this spot originally, but it likely would have been the door to the stairs going down to the coal room, not a fully walled off hallway.  If anyone's interested in a floor plan I'd be glad to draw one up...

The next step in the process is plastering the holes and closing the space back up.  Doing this means we finally need to finish the framing around the fridge.  The fridge sits in the space that was likely the doorway to the back stairs that went up to the second floor of the addition (which would probably have been maids rooms).  In honor of the occasion we bought a new framing nailer, and since we can never catch a break, my beloved 3 year old Hitachi compressor sprung a leak halfway through.  We're only a few boards from finishing, so we'll just finish it off with screws while the compressor gets repaired.  And if you're wondering why the framing is done oddly, well, that's what happens when you change your mind halfway through about the design and don't want to go out in the snow for more lumber!

A few miscellaneous notes about the space we've uncovered:

-  The door from the dining room into the (once) hallway was the spot of the original door to the porch/conservatory.  Above the existing door you can see where the original sandstone lintel was removed to be used for one of the added windows elsewhere on the house.

-  The butler's pantry was closed off to be used as a child's bedroom, at least it seems that way from the pink paint and puppy stickers we keep finding.

-  This floor was originally grained like the current entry, then had linoleum put down (it currently has awful teal carpet, the last piece in the house).  We will likely re-grain and stencil it for the time being, but we also know of a big kitchen with original 1895 linoleum we may be able to salvage at some point in the future.
-  The wall between the butler's pantry and the kitchen was never fully demoed.  They only took down and re-plastered (on board) the plaster that was above the baseboard.  So when we removed that section of trim (which was out an inch from the existing wall), we found more of the same shiny dark green paint that was original to the kitchen.

-  As we suspected, the yard side of the addition is at least partially brick, while the front is wood framed.  If someone could explain this to me I would really appreciate it, because I've never seen anything like it.
-  We can see the 7 wires that belonged to the kitchen annunciator and a tin speaking tube, where they go, nobody knows...

The annunciator wires are the thin black
ones in the center of the picture

Those are all the updates I can think of at the moment.  Next stop, plaster.