Our New Old House

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!

I’ve made a little more progress on the walls in the front bedroom.  It’s a slow process and I’m maybe working a little too meticulously.  I worry that I’m trying to be a perfectionist with these walls.  One of my fellow housebloggers at This Old Crack House is crazy for smooth walls and I may be sliding down that slippery slope.  It starts with patching a few cracks before priming.  It ends with applying a skim coat over the whole room and agonizing over every tiny ripple and dent.  I’m not there yet, but I can see it from here!

 I did my first corner last night.  Pictures are coming soon, I promise.  All the corners in this room are cracked and separated.  Structurally, the walls are sound, it’s just that nobody repaired the plaster that cracked as the house settled, so the cracks have just been growing under layers of wallpaper for 50 years or so. 

 Like I said before, I’ve never done this plaster thing before so when someone recommended using a wet sponge to smooth the plaster after it had dried, I figured I’d try it.  A sponge didn’t really do much, but a regular kitchen scouring pad worked great.  Nate, my friend!  Why are you submitting your lungs, your eyes, and your roommates to the dust of dry sanding?  Wet sanding is the way to go, bro!  Maybe dry sanding is faster?  Anyway, there will be no dust angels in my house, at least not from plaster dust!  Maybe I can make paint chip angels when I start stripping the woodwork.  (shudder)

I did a corner over the door last night and it turned out pretty good!  When I started getting sleepy and frustrated, though, I put away the plaster and worked on taping the rest of the cracks in the room in preparation for plastering later.  I got almost all the taping done last night so I’ll have a jump on things when I get back to it this weekend.  We’re supposed to get a snow storm so it’ll be a good weekend to stay inside playing with white powdery stuff.

 Let’s see… what else have I been doing around the house?  Oh, I’ve been stripping more paint off the door in the basement, getting Brandon’s help on getting the paint off one of the registers using ammonia, and perhaps most dramatically, continuing my quest for a razor scraper.

 Those cheapo utility scrapers just aren’t cutting it for me anymore.  So on my last trip to Menard’s I picked up a better quality, slightly larger hand held razor scraper.  I got it home, tried it out, found myself perfectly satisfied with it, and promptly LOST it somewhere in my house!  I don’t know what could have happened to it!  Somewhere between pausing in scraping the dining room floor and stepping into the hallway to get the broom and dustpan, I put it down somewhere and haven’t been able to find it since.  Brandon helped me look for it all that evening.  We continued the search the next day.  We overturned every item in our house, looked in all the least likely places.  I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster we looked in the refrigerator!  It’s still missing.  I may have to buy another one until it turns up.  I hope they’re still sale priced at Menards when I go. 

That’s it for my update for now.  Happy Wednesday, everybody!

This weekend I finished scrubbing the walls in the front bedroom and finally got to start patching nail holes, cracks, and imperfections.  For the small stuff I used this lightweight spackle stuff.

It was totally fun to work with. It had the consistency of marshmallow fluff!

Patching nail holes was super easy!

Now you see it…

Now you don’t…. or, WON’T after I paint.

After I did all the nail holes and imperfections, the room looked like it had a bad case of the chicken pox covered with calamine lotion.

Since I was having so much fun patching things I decided to take a stab at repairing the larger cracks. Keep in mind I’ve never done this before, so if I look a little petrified in my photos, that’s why. Someone at Menards recommended this self adhesive fiber tape. It seemed pretty easy to work with and I had the set of cracks over the door taped in no time.

Brandon had some fun playing with the macro setting on my camera.

And then he had some fun playing with the color enhance setting on my camera.

Wow, with that color enhance thing, all the little cuts and knicks and raw spots on my hands really look awful!

I’ve never worked with plaster before, so I took some time mixing it just right. The Country Crock tub Brandon emptied earlier while making his awesome mac and cheese worked great for a plaster tub. It took a little while to get the hang of applying the plaster. And I didn’t know how fast it would start to harden! Holy cow that’s fast!

More pictures later of the sanding and the biggest challenge, the cracked corners! I hope to get started on those tonight.

This weekend my college friend, Chantell came to visit. She’s from Chicago and is going to grad school at Syracuse. She took the train all the way from Syracuse to Chicago for the holidays, and took the train from Chicago to here for a weekend visit. As soon as we made plans for her to come, she asked me, “Do I get to help work on the house?” Clearly, she had no idea what she was getting herself into! But Chantell’s a good sport and is one of those crazy people (like me) who can find fun in even the most mundane and tedious tasks, so we put on the radio, sang some crazy songs, and got some work done around the house.

First she finished up the last bit of scraping wallpaper in the front bedroom:

While she did that I helped Brandon take the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. (More on that in a little bit.) Next I helped Chantell scrub the walls to get the last of the wallpaper residue off and get them clean and prepped for plaster patching. There aren’t any pictures of me helping with this part, but I was there! She’ll vouch for me.

Look what a difference washing the wall made! The paint almost looks nice enough to leave alone! The spot in the middle has been scrubbed.

In this picture, the left wall has been scrubbed, the right wall has not. Like you needed me to tell you that anyway.

While Chantell and I were scrubbing, Brandon took the closet door off its hinges and took all the hardware off the woodwork so I can start stripping the paint. Apparently, when the previous owners put up a new style of curtains, they never removed the old hardware, just added more and more brackets, hooks, and screws as they went. So here’s the bag full of hardware he took off two windows:

Some of the brackets had been painted over multiple times. Here’s Brandon’s screwdriver and putty knife stuck behind one bracket:

He also took the register off the heat duct and removed the hardware from the door so I could put them into ammonia and soak the paint off.

When the previous owners were getting ready to put up the wallpaper, someone scratched some math problems on the wall in pencil.

Like I said before, Brandon and I also took the air conditioner out of our bedroom window. This project was a BEAST! First of all, the thing had been there for like 20 years. It weighs a ton. It leaked condensation all over the window sill, causing water damage to the wood and the plaster below. That will have to be repaired later. Our first challenge was undoing all the crappy insulating they had done all those years ago.

Brandon popped the front cover off so he could get a better grip. What a mess!

After wiggling it around a bit, we figured out it had to go out and not in, so we let go from the inside and let it sag dangerously off the side of the house.

There are no pictures of the next few steps because it took all three of us to get underneath it and haul it down to the ground. I’ll admit, we dropped it the last foot or so. I brought up the dolly and hauled it to the curb.

 We closed the storm window and I cleaned up the inside of the window as best I could.  The paint is all flaking off and the accumulation of dead bugs and cobwebs was disgusting.  But our bedroom is now just a little bit more insulated from the cold.

 Since it was really nice outside on Saturday I took the opportunity to spread some mulch around the back door to cover up the mud back there until we can get a new concrete slab poured.  While Brandon and I were working on that we found the coolest spider underneath a bag of mulch!   

It’s called a Woodlouse Hunter Spider and it only eats what are known around here as “roly-polies.” (They’re known in other places as woodlice, pillbugs, or armadillo bugs.) It’s perfectly harmless to humans, but sure doesn’t look harmless! I looked it up to be sure. I learned a lot about woodlice too! They live in damp places in the dirt and eat decaying plants and wood. You’ll find them under logs, in wood piles, and in this case, under bags of cedar mulch. They are also harmless to humans, but can indicate a dampness problem if they’re found near the foundation of your house. Like earthworms, they help enrich the soil.

EDIT: A kindly reader named Ron informed me that Woodlouse spiders are in fact dangerous sometimes because they are aggressive.  They’ll bite and the bite can be painful and nasty and all sorts of terrible things!  So don’t mess with them.  Thanks Ron!

Ok, moving on from backyard biology…

After we went down the street to Grandma’s and had a Mexican meal that couldn’t be beat, we came back home and I taught Chantell how to use the heat gun.

First, I made sure she was protected from the lead paint fumes.  That meant fitting, adjusting, and testing the respirator.  Hilarity ensued.

Then we got down to the serious business of stripping paint. Here Chantell waits eagerly while I plug in the heat gun.

Chantell listened carefully to instructions.

And watched me demonstrate.

Then I turned her loose!

She almost finished the whole door!

We did have some time to relax this weekend too. The cats got the whole futon to themselves while we were working.

Scratch didn’t mind sharing though.

My grandma gave me some used curtains that my aunt took down from her house, and they sort of complete the look of our functioning bedroom. We haven’t taken down the wallpaper in this room yet because it’s in moderately good condition. When it’s all put together I like to think it has a shabby-chic sort of look to it. It’s a little too dark, granted, but it works for now. (Don’t mind my demonic cat.)