Our New Old House

You know how you’re supposed to caulk around woodwork and stuff to make a nice clean seal between the woodwork and the wall? Well, for once, the previous owners of this house did something right and they did apply a nice bead of caulk way back when. But that was like a bazillion years ago and with the house settling and stuff, a lot of that caulk has chipped and cracked away. I’d like to remove it anyway so I can get paint right up to the woodwork and then apply a new seal of caulk when I’m all done to tidy it all up. The caulk they used a bazillion years ago hardened into a stone-like substance and the only way I’ve found to get it out is to chip at it over and over and over and over again with the pointy edge of my scraping tool.

I’m not really expecting any better answer than “Nope, that’s what you gotta do,” but if I’m wrong and there’s a faster/easier/less painful on my knuckles (from scraping against the wall repeatedly) way to do this, I’d love to hear it.

And don’t say “Have your husband do it!”

To sweeten the deal, here’s some pictures:

I used the heat gun to strip the paint off the top of the baseboards first. Between the baseboard and the plaster wall is caulk. It’s brittle and breaks pretty easily when I chop it with the scraping tool.

Like so…

Sound effect for this picture: “chop.”

Also, just to remind myself that I’m still a girl, I painted my toenails. See? Yeah, I spent the whole afternoon chopping at caulk, barefoot with pretty red toenails. It’s the little things that keep me going.

Finally! Some photos of our kitchen looking closer than ever to being done! At least it looks clean and usable now.

Ok time for before and after!

Woo hoo!  I have my kitchen back!  We still have plans to add cabinets over the stove and fridge,  refinish and paint the existing cabinets, and actually paint the walls something other than white, but we’re getting closer!

[tags]cabinets, paint, plaster, future plans, kitchen, ceiling, light fixtures, flooring, dishwasher, drywall, refrigerator, photos[/tags]

I wanted to take a picture of this before it got painted over. The living room and dining room both had this trim around the top of the wall.

I had to do a lot of plaster work in this room. I’m particularly proud of reconstructing this corner that had crumbled away as the house settled.

Here’s a before picture:

One side of the wall over the fireplace needed some major repair:

I started attacking the gunk on the floor with a new vengeance, doing garbage bag sized sections rather than grocery bag sized ones.

Mom came over with some of my friends to help me put primer on the walls.

We bought a new rug, cleaned everything up, and arranged the furniture and here’s the result! It’s not finished, but I can see the finish line from here!

Phew! We can actually live in the living room now! Paint colors for the wall are being planned, also I’m going to restore the bookcases with leaded glass windows.

[tags] built-ins, photos, plaster, furniture, paint, future plans, ceiling fan, flooring, living room, fireplace, cabinets[/tags]

Hello fans and followers of Our New Old House! It’s time for another quick update to bring you up to speed on what we’ve been working on the past couple months. Today’s post is about the kitchen. Lots to talk about there so I’ll split it into two posts. (Ok, I confess. I haven’t taken a final picture of our kitchen now that it’s finished, so I’ll have to post that another time. That’ll be part 2. Phew! I feel better having told you that.)

When I last blogged, the kitchen had a brand spankin’ new floor and we were trying frantically to get all the wallpaper scraped and the ceiling finished. The paint colors in the kitchen were… delightful.

When we scraped the wall over one of the counters, we found this weird black stuff underneath that wasn’t on any of the other walls we scraped. Not even under the counter where we put the dishwasher in, which was right below that countertop. Anybody know what this stuff is/was?

The funny thing about it was that when we painted it with primer, it bled through and came out just as messy and weird.

But we forged ahead and painted over everything with tons of primer.

(Seen enough of the back of Brandon’s head yet?)

After my friend Laura did an awesome job scraping this wall we found the outline of the original kitchen sink and the outline of some wood trim like is in the bathroom. Maybe you can’t really see it here, but use your imagination. Anyway, the shape of the outline matches the shape of the kitchen that’s now in the basement. We think that sink was originally in the kitchen and got moved downstairs to be a dump sink. I LOVE having a sink in the basement so I’m grateful.

Let’s see… what else did I do?  Oh!  I put joint compound on the drywall on the ceiling.  There was a tricky spot over the stove and fridge where the drywall was about 2 inches too short.  I had Brandon cut me some 1-inch wide strips to fit in there and I glued them to the furring strips before putting mesh and joint compound over them.  They came out pretty good!

The gap:

The drywall strips glued in place:

Joint compound going on over the mesh:

Almost done painting:

Check back for part 2 when I’ll have some finished pictures for you!

[tags]ceiling, plaster, paint, drywall, photos, cabinets, kitchen[/tags]

I enlisted Brandon’s help this weekend in mixing plaster for me while I put it on the walls. Eventually he started putting it on the walls himself, so that part got boring, but together we finished patching all the cracks, holes, and corners in the front bedroom.

Pictures!

My first corner!

Kind of blotchy after wet sanding.

See how bad our corners are? This one has fiber tape over it.

Gosh, is that how my hair looks from the back?

I’m not particularly proud of how this corner came out. I’ll sand it down a bit and add another smoother layer.

Ok, enough about the plaster. Let’s talk about the weather! It’s been cold here! So cold I can’t think up a colorful simile with which to describe how cold it’s been. (Leave me a comment if you’ve got a good one.) Anyway, it was a great opportunity to show just what a difference plastic sheeting can make when you’ve got leaky windows and worthless storms.

Here we see a window with plastic sheeting intact. Notice: NO FROST! That means no warm, moist air is leaking out into the frigid outdoors, and no frigid outdoor air is leaking inside.

Now let’s look at a window on which the integrity of the plastic sheeting has been compromised by the claw of a scheming cat.

And in other news…

I FOUND MY SCRAPER!!!

See if you can spot it in this photo:

How about now?

Yes, folks, the scraper was INSIDE Brandon’s bicycle. How it got there I’ll never know. But I’ll tell you, the only way I found it was by buying three new scrapers of the exact same kind that very morning. (Still sale priced at Menard’s, btw.) After I’d safely tucked them away in my tool box where they belong, the prodigal scraper glinted at me from inside the bicycle and we were tearfully reunited.

If I can stop hiding things from myself, this house may actually get done someday!