Work Continues

Work continues on the house, lately jumping from little project to little project depending on the weather, what mood I'm in. :) Recently it's been busy with drywalling, which takes a few days from start to finish because of the mudding, letting dry, sanding (which I HATE by the way - it's the worst thing about drywalling), then retouching spots with extra mud making sure the new patch is nice and smooth along side the existing wall.

While working on the staircase ceiling/upper wall, I decided to redo the wall in the laundry room which actually would sit behind the washer & dryer (if I had one). Lucky for me, the walls on the north side and west side were two different thicknesses - and unlucky for the walls who wanted to cause trouble, I've got two different thicknesses of drywall :) So all I need to do now is paint.

Work on the outside of the house continues as well. The painting I put on hold for a bit due to the rain we were supposed to get. However, only twice did we get rain when they called for it so I it's possible I could almost be done with the painting by now. It continues now that the rain appears to be holding for the time being, and thanks to great family friends I've got scaffolding to use instead climbing up a shaky ladder.

I do find it interesting that while we have for the most part been in a drought, the grass can still grow. At the end of July I had to venture back up to IL for a dentist appointment and wasn't back for about 10 days. During that time, the grass in the backyard grew knee tall. Let me also point out that during those 1o days, we were in triple digits not including heat indices which under any normal circumstance should have killed off, I dunno, grass that doesn't get water. Needless to stay, it was quite the chore when it came to mowing it. Made even harder by the fact that my mower's start pull-cord snapped at its base = hunk of junk now. What's worse is that the weed whacker broke the day before so I couldn't even attempt to hack down the yard to semi-controlled jungle. Knowing there was no way I could mow down the grass, I went a bought a brand new weed whacker :) And boy, let me tell you it was like Christmas and I was the little girl who couldn't wait to get it out of the box. Took me a few hours and a borrowed mower to get it done, but the backyard (and front yard for that matter) is under control.

Fixing Old Fallen Walls

One problem you have when you live in an old house, particularly one older than 100 years +, are falling walls. Back in the day, lathe and plaster made up standard walls in houses and it worked great - then. This old house, as any old house does, has eventually settled on its foundation over wear and tear, and thus a few walls have cracked here and there. Thankfully, the kick-ass wallpaper my mom put up nearly 20 years ago has helped keep the walls from completely falling to the floor. But occasionally, one must fix the cracked walls to update the house, and let me tell you it's no fun.

Years back (at least 10 or so) our family did a re-roofing project on the house (my first and since then I've done two other houses now and roofing hasn't grown in the 'enjoyable things to do' category) because the old roof severely needed it. We discovered during the process of roofing why certain areas of the roof were bad and thus why water was leaking into the house, ruining the plaster walls and ceilings. (long story short, the roof comprised of three layers of asphalt shingles and two layers of original wood shingles w/o any decking).

One area where the ceiling and walls had water damage that hadn't been repaired was in the staircase. As seen in the pics, our staircase is a beautiful, yet hard to wallpaper, paint, or do any general repairing, spiral staircase. Since there's no real way to get a ladder up there to work on it safely, I built a little platform so I could get up and work without injury (knock on wood).

Part of this area has already fallen, which is great for me seeing that I have less to deal with. But there is still some areas around the already fallen plaster that is loose but the trick is to only take off the loose stuff without damaging the surrounding good plaster anymore. So how do we do this? With a lovely little tool Daddy bought :)

A Little Catch-Up

Having not been a round a while, I thought I'd post a few pictures of some recent happenings around the house.

As you've seen from a previous posting, the pipes in the dining room are now gone and I've gotten about half of the room painted. The problem was that some of the old, 20 year old wallpaper was off and some wasn't, so I wanted to match the color up as close as I could so when I painted over it, it would look ok. I have yet to do the west wall because I plan on putting up sheetrock on top of the existing paster and wallpaper to help reinforce the wall, which if you look closely under the wallpaper is slightly cracked. My theory is because the south side of the foundation sank over the years, the wall cracked in adjusting to it. The downfall of old houses I'm afraid...

Can you see the pipes??
As I mentioned in a July post, the wall on the stair landing was completely redone due to water damaged, and here are the before and after pics. In the picture you can see just how much damage the water did to the lathe underneath the plaster. We didn't have any wallpaper to match what was on the wall already, so I just painted over a little mudding criss-cross design I attempted simply to make it blend in a little with the painted wallpaper next to it.

More to come later on...back to work on the kitchen (all most done!!!)

Weekend Project...kinda

For those wondering where I've been since my last post - busy busy and not around. Last week sent me back up north for a dentist appointment (note: root canal wasn't too bad), but before I headed up toward cooler climates, my dad came down to help with the weekend project: re-roofing the porch area over the front door (as you'll remember from my previous post, it was in dire need of having the 'potholes' fixed.

Despite an hour of heavy downpour and a night of rain (during which we were able to tarp and cover what we could so the water didn't get into the house itself), in two and a half days we put up all new framing (which hadn't been planned, but extremely needed it as you'll see in the following videos), decking, and the felt nailed down. We ran out of time so no shingling over the weekend; however I did manage to get it shingled last night and finished with the cap between the new and old parts this morning. I do still need to put the tar around the edging of the house so water can't leak in there, but at least it's done and hopefully - fingers crossed - the porch won't leak anymore!




More to come on the house projects, but for now you can watch the video on our discovery of why we had so many problems...