Getting plastered again and a nasty storm

The problem.

 I finally began the last major plaster repair job in the house. When we purchased the house, the second floor had some damaged ceilings from a roof leak. The roof was replaced by the previous owner, but the water damage was not fixed. This will be my third plaster repair and I am getting better at it. First step is to remove the loose plaster. This is a messy job that results in a lot of dust, and pieces of plaster everywhere. Then, you must secure the old plaster around the edge by drilling holes, squirting in a prep solution, squirting in glue, then securing the plaster to the lathe with wood screws

and large washers. This is even

messier as the prep solution drips

on the floor, and the glue squirts of the

holes as you drill in the screws.

The solution

After allowing the glue to dry for 24 hours, you apply the first coat of plaster. Plastering is simple. Doing it well is a learned skill. I am getting better at it. Many DIY home improvement projects are a blend of both but this is more skill than anything. Slapping plaster on a wall is easy, making it look nice is tough.

Luckily, the third step hides any amateur mistakes you may have made. After a couple of applications of the patching plaster, you put down a couple coats of joint compound, which is really easy to apply. It smooths out your mistakes, especially after you wet sand the surface.

The final result.

Finally, I primed the the repair area with a spray primer. This should prep it nicely for the ceiling paint, and what ever color we choose for the wall. I do have one more small repair area to repair in the other corner, and some other touch up on the walls (thank you Frat brothers).

Choosing the wall paint will be difficult. I am using the room as an office, and will continue to do so. But we may set it up with a couch or futon for a second guest room. We have kind of exhausted the available colors in the rest of our home, and hate to repeat. We may go a bit strong or rich, maybe a deep green. We will see.

On the weather front (pun intended), it has been a rather cold and nasty winter since Christmas. For four weeks in a row, my home weather station has a least one day of below zero temperatures. The spell culminated with a rough storm that dumped a couple inches of ice underneath a few inches of snow. The entire mess froze into a glacier on sidewalks and driveways that we are just now escaping. The longer days and higher sun angle of mid February are greatly appreciated.

Back at it

Repaired ceiling. I'm actually getting good at this. Note the
missing molding. 

With the holidays fully behind us, I have little excuse left to keep from diving back into some open projects at the house. Back in the Fall, I started after the upstairs hallway, tearing off the awful molding and some of the fixtures. It remained in that condition through Christmas, and Cindy has been beyond patient with the mess and I really need to get going on that work. First step was to repair the damaged ceiling. There were holes where the multiple smoke detectors and light fixtures hung, and where the cheap molding was attached. Next is  the big job of repairing the plaster wall that has become detached from the lathe backing. I researched the process months ago and had already purchased the needed supplies.

Holes drilled, but wall still bulging out.

I fixed the ceiling pretty quickly and decided I could no longer put off the wall repair. The first step is to drill multiple holes through the plaster in which to pump the construction adhesive. Then, you use drywall screws with big washers to pull the plaster back to the lathe, hoping that the construction adhesive bonds the two back together. This step actually went pretty well, and I pumped damn near an entire tube of adhesive into the wall. Very little oozed back out so it went somewhere, hopefully where it was needed. The drywall screws grabbed the lathe easily.

Drywall screws holding the plaster in place.

After 24 hours, you must remove the screws and hope that the plaster remains attached to the wall. Surprisingly, that's pretty much what happened. The good news is that the plaster is not longer moving back and forth in place, the bad news is that the result is an ugly mess. Some of the plaster chiped, then there are the places where a bit of the construction adhesive sticks to the washers and pulls away the plaster and paint when you remove them. So, the next step is to fill the holes and cracks with a joint compound then I will probably have to (horrors!) skim that entire wall. I've never skimmed a wall, and I'm not looking forward to it, but it is the best way to smooth out an uneven wall surface, and will look best when painted. The results of that will be in an upcoming blog.

The repaired wall. Really. Hole fix and skimming comes next.

Otherwise I did some finishing work in the bathroom. I replaced the old, industrial light fixture in the bathroom ceiling with a new, LED fixture. Of course, the previous installation did not properly install the junction box. It is just "floating" in place above the ceiling, held only by the wiring. The proper way to fix this is to go into the attic and secure the fixture to an attic floor joist. This involves moving our boxed Christmas decorations and removing the attic floor. An "easier" way would be to attach the junction box to a nearby joist, by accessing it through the hole in the bathroom ceiling. but it looks like there is nothing readily available. So, when the weather warms up, attic here I come. Of course, there is blown in insulation between the attic floor and ceiling below so that stuff will get everywhere.

In the world of upstate weather, after a brutally cold stretch in the end of December into January, the end of January and the beginning of February has been fairly benign. Not all that cold and still relatively snow free. I had been thinking that February would turn cold again, but it's been near normal so far, with a real thaw expected in the next week. I still think this winter has another brutal cold stretch in it, and I'm afraid that may mean March now, right when we are rightfully tired of winter and ready for Spring. Good news is that I understand the maple trees are being tapped and sap has begun to run. The first delicious product of Spring cannot be far away!

Stairs, a window, and plaster

Half painted stairs. They are completed now.

A decent amount has been accomplished since my last post, mainly due to a week off work and a decision to not to travel but to devote the time to projects. First on the list was to complete the stairwell painting. I had two readers suggest that I paint half the stairs (side to side) allowing access to the basement by us and the cats, kind of like a construction zone reduced to one lane (normal summer driving in Pennsylvania). I liked that advice and moved ahead. Now, I expected that Cindy and I would not walk through the wet paint, and for the most part , this was a correct assumption. It was however, a leap of faith to depend on Katia and Natasha to use their kitty smarts and stay off the wet paint, with a bit of guidance in the form of large objects placed blocking the "closed" section. Katia, whom I alternately call "smarty pants" and "Klutzia" because she is both smart and clumsy, turned out to be both. As I was working, she started down the stairs, carefully avoiding the wet paint (smart). As she passed me she cut over to the wet side, prompting me to yell her name. She stopped (smart), then sat in the wet paint awaiting further instructions (clumsy). I followed her down to the basement and she allowed me to inspect her feet, which were remarkably dry. Her cat butt, however, was a bit gray, so she was confined to the basement for a few hours, which she really didn't seem to mind. Natasha decided to simply avoid the staircase altogether and slept through the process, demonstrating her ability to "hold it" for several hours.

I finally installed (with Cindy's help of course), the final window on the first floor. In this blog I wrote about installing the windows, while also somehow forgetting to order one for the kitchen. I ordered the forgotten window back in the Spring and we installed it last week. If you remember, or re-read the blog, I was very proud of myself for measuring every window correctly, even allowing for "slop" since none of the old windows were perfectly square. Heh heh. Well, confidence is a dangerous thing and I ordered one window to complete the job, and it was wrong. Technically, I measured correctly but forgot to allow for a window frame that was off by a quarter inch. Rather than re-order and have a useless window, I decided to "fix" the old window. Cindy was notably impressed as I shaved down the inside of the crooked frame, smoothed and filled my work, and repainted. This essentially "squared" the frame and allowed the window to fit.

The offending wall.

Cindy proclaimed herself to be tired of looking at our ugly upstairs hallway and so that has become the next interior "room" to be repaired. Unfortunately, there are some special issues that need to be addressed in the hallway. First, on one wall, the plaster has pulled away from the lathe.  This gives the wall a spongy feel as the plaster moves. If left like this, the plaster will eventually crack and fall away. The thought of removing around 9 square feet of plaster was not comforting, so I did some research. I found a video detailing repair of such a wall at the This Old House website. Essentially, you drill multiple holes through the plaster (not into the lathe), inject plaster bonder, followed by construction adhesive. Then, you install several dry wall screws with large washers through the plaster into the lathe to pull the plaster back to the lathe. After 24 hours, you remove the dry wall screws, fill the holes, and remove the excess glue that has oozed from the holes. Then sand, skim, and sand the wall and your done. Sounds easy, right? Wish me luck.

Ugly, poorly installed molding. I plan to replace it with
prettier, poorly installed molding.

The other problem is common through the house. There is a large gap between the wall and the ceiling that had been covered by cheap molding. I removed the molding and will fill the gap with spray foam insulation and replace with a better quality molding. That is rather tedious and although I'm getting better at mitering and installing molding, the additional difficulty of nailing the molding to exterior walls, which are masonry, will cause me to take more time. I will not be installing the fancy crown molding that we have downstairs, perhaps something closer to what I installed in the vestibule.