timber!

Just a brief update between chopping up the tree that came down last week.  While I'm more than a bit disgruntled to be wasting the time when there are so many other things to be working on, I should be grateful.  What came down was directly in between the schoolhouse and the fire pit, and nearly on top of our stored roof slate.  Other than an impaled plastic chair and a cracked cinder block, nothing was harmed, not even the antique iron lantern that was still standing after the tree fell AROUND it.  Mind boggling....

                 

Another plus?  The new chainsaw we had bought and given up on as hopelessly broken three years ago (and forgotten to return) was able to be coaxed back to life now that we know considerably more about repairing tools.  It's nice to know the chainsaw is back in our arsenal.

As far as work on the house itself, we decided the now fully walled and insulated third floor can wait till cooler weather for floor finishing and painting.  Instead, we've turned our attention to the future master bath which adjoins our bedroom.  As I've mentioned before, it was the largest and most beautiful bedroom in the house when it was built.  When we bought the house it was saturated with cat urine (badly enough that we thought it was a mystery leak and almost walked away from the deal), chopped up with walls going across the fireplace tile and had a dropped ceiling -all this on top of the issues every room in the house had with water damage and abuse.

 For now it's just storage, and aside from partitioning the room with the laundry and walk-in closet, and a quick pass on the floors, nothing's been done.  We're many years from affording the bathroom, so for now the room needs some additional plaster repair, a temporary box built over the exposed laundry room plumping, trim and paint stripping.  All of these are in progress - finished is boxing in and blue boarding the plumbing (plastering will happen in the next couple of weeks.  Not exciting unless it's your house I suppose, but I guess that's the case with most things I do and write.  Boxing in the plumbing actually turned into a monumental task after a tiny leak was discovered coming from the washer plumbing.  We thought we were going to have to rerun the pipes, only to discover the leak was coming from the hook-up box in the wall.  Trying to repair that leak lead to the Watts Intelliflow emergency shut off malfunctioning, i.e. no laundry right before having house guests, and a few weeks of back and forth with them to figure out exactly which part was broken.  Thankfully, all fixed now.

As part of the work, we stuffed all the exposed cavities with Roxul Safe and Sound to mitigate the noise from the laundry and bathroom - the difference is amazing, even with the door to the bathroom open and the broken stained glass window on the laundry wall.  Well worth the $50 we spent on the bag, and I'm glad local stores have starting carrying it.

With all this rain we've been having, the yard isn't the only thing growing like a weed, Maugrim is 9 months old and around 90 pounds.  He finally met a dog bigger than him the other day, and wasn't quite sure what to make of him.  

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.  

miscellany...

 Given my long absence, today will be a bit of a photo dump.  I noticed that my stats actually went up in the last week, so I'm assuming people were checking in on me, and that a failure to post would result in a search party appearing on my doorstep.

The reason for my disappearance (other than a very needy puppy); the tedium of painting our plaster moldings in the current entry room (future library).  Given that our moldings are quite simple, I was shocked at how impossibly long they took to paint.  The cove seems to have been gilded and wallpapered in its past lives, and currently sports a thick uneven coat of joint compound and white paint.  While I know it should have been fully scraped, I just didn't have it in me, especially given that there is a layer of drywall over the original plaster ceiling.  The drywall was extremely well done, and we'll most likely leave it alone until we're ready to do the final restoration of the room - rebuilding the lost built-ins and wallpapering.  I'm hopeful that the drywall is hiding original wallpaper or stenciling, and as long as I believe that, the drywall doesn't stand a chance of surviving us finishing this space.  For now, several coats of gold paint are in the cove, with a brick red picking out some of the bullnosed sections, and the ceiling has been painted a pale gloss gold.

The scaffolding remained a feature of the room longer than I care to admit as I figured out one unassailable truth - decorating a 10 1/2 foot Christmas tree becomes infinitely easier when one has jolly yellow scaffolding to do it from.

In other news, this is the most perfect tree that has ever been grown, and I don't know that we'll ever find it's equal...  Also, in just a couple of weeks our dear little Maugrim has doubled in size (now 30 pounds, and taller than I'd care to admit).  At this rate of exponential growth I fear for the future of the planet, as such growth must be some sort of Grey Goo scenario.

PRESENTS!!!!!!

And for the rest, let me present: Christmas decorations, part of a huge parlor set we recently obtained, the enormous framed antique photo of our house that we've been waiting to hang for almost 3 years, and the finished painted crown (and partially finished woodwork).

 

 

And while I had fully intended to take photos of our Hanukkah party (actually HAMukkah, because we just can't find it in ourselves to ever be normal), we had too much fun to bother with pictures.  Our lonely menorah is all that remains...

well, hello there...

My melancholy mood. brought on by nearing the end of scraping the wallpaper from all these old walls, was relieved by one last surprise today.

Waiting to make my acquaintance on one of the last walls I've worked on was a self-portrait of a little girl, initialed M.K.  I can only guess that this is Mildred Kelly, only child of our house's original owner, John G. Kelly, and future wife of Robert King (of the King Estate, Baywood).  She hasn't been alone on the wall all these years though, there are other profiles and initials on this section, although who they might be I don't know.

A.S.

E.S.

Cousins, workers, maids?  I have no idea.  Hopefully we'll encounter more names as our research continues.  For now I just hope we can save this section of wall before it crumbles away.
 

the drawings are on the small wall to the right of the chimney wall

I'm grateful for this discovery, in this room, as this room was home to another huge drawing on the plaster which was destroyed by our electrician before I stripped the wallpaper - the only evidence being the outer edges of sketched hills on either side of a gaping hole.  What it could have been will haunt me.  

Of course, this isn't the only art we've found in the house.  Several rooms have sported sketches of room outlines and molding profiles.  The best however, and one in a series of strange coincidences that gave rise to our house's name, is found near the floor of the guest bedroom.

the tower room

We've been bouncing around with several different projects over the past few weeks.  Given the periodic torrential rains and such, it's been about 50/50 whether I'm inside or out.  During the showers (and overly sunny days too) I've been slowly putting the third floor tower room back together.  I started this over the winter, and since then have cleared the room, stripped the wallpaper from the walls and ceiling (only one more room to go!), reinstalled the storms (only ones in the house), demoed the bad plaster, repaired and insulated the eaves and begun completing the electrical.  With the lines in place I could finally start patching the walls.

victorian tower bedroom before...

wallpaper stripping begins

The whole third floor was inundated with water for years (decades?) from the failing roof flashing. This has obviously caused a number of issues with the plaster, everything from rotted lathe and plaster, to wholesale failure, broken keys and cracks.  All these issues mean I'm using every trick in the book for making repairs in this little room.  For holes, I typically do true three coat plaster, using wire lathe on top of the existing wood lathe to make sure things key properly.  I was lucky in that when we bought the house (and contents, mostly bags of trash) there was also a box of expanded corner lathe, which when flattened out is perfect for patching these smaller holes (using several overlapping pieces instead of trying to cut a piece from a large razor sharp sheet).

This room only had a handful of spots that lent themselves to this though, the slanted ceilings were too much for this self-taught plasterer to handle, so I used 1/4 inch drywall instead (also came with the house, and using it seems to be easier than throwing it away), taping the joints on the first pass, and I'll fill in the rest on the second pass (I use 90 minute durabond for the first coat, and premixed to smooth it out on the second pass).

In spots where the whole wall came down we used half inch blueboard, and will do two coat veneer plaster over it, again using durabond to bed the tape.

That's great stuff foam filling the gaps in the cornice

When possible (it wasn't in this case) I like to leave the lathe behind the blueboard - while the veneer plaster looks excellent, it has the same hollow feeling as drywall if there isn't a solid surface behind it.  This knee wall was interesting to work on, it turns out the dividing wall between the two rooms (now covered in old rock lathe) had been moved a foot forward at some point, this necessitated sliding the blue board through the gap where the walls met into the next room, as there were no studs to fasten it to.

Last but not least, I've been trying my hand at repairing the cracks and loose plaster.  The first year we owned the house I tried plaster washers, which were junk as far as I'm concerned.  Since then I've either ignored the problem, taped the crack, or just opened up the bad spot and did a standard repair.  Since seeing others use Big Wally's Plaster Magic I thought I would try it, until I saw the price...  To do the work required in this house would likely require several hundred bucks, which is just not an option.  Instead, I figured I'd try it using materials we already had on hand, pink plaster bonder, construction adhesive and fender washers.  So far my results are mixed, although admittedly I likely didn't vacuum the holes on the first pass adequately as I was afraid of pulling the plaster off the wall.  

If you're curious about the process, here's someone's tutorial which is more or less the same thing I'm doing.  Once I get more sections done I'll talk more about it, and well, if Big Wally's wants to send me some of theirs I'll gladly do a side by side comparison...

I swear my walls aren't bleeding...