For those of you who have remodeled a house on your own, you quickly find that there are plenty of projects that require an extra set of hands. As was the case with this weekend's projects - ceilings! I don't have to tell you that old houses - with foundation problems - will eventually have problems with the ceilings (and walls and floors and etc etc :) In particular, the master bathroom was in serious need of repair, but the problem is how to repair it. The easiest way overall was to put up new sheetrock over the old lathe and plaster. Of course one could always patch up the cracks then texture it or popcorn it, but the problem with that solution is that in old houses like this one, they actually put a wallpaper like material on the ceiling over the dried plaster. And unless you can pull all of that off, there's no point in trying to texture it with joint compound or popcorn because the paper will suck up the moisture and peel off (trust me, experience speaking here). Thus the only real course of action is to put up new sheetrock. And boy isn't that fun...
While this is the easiest solution to a cracked and falling ceiling, it requires a little more help than my two own hands can muster up. Enter - my dad for the weekend :) With the master bathroom being probably the worst ceiling in the house, that was the first project we needed to tackle in the 72 hours while Dad was here. However, because the walls & ceilings are angled, we first needed to drop the ceiling down a few inches so we could match up the new walls on the angles to the ceiling itself. Enter another slight problem - using a stud finder with lathe and plaster doesn't work all that well, thus it's the time consuming action of trial and error with a drill and screw to find the studs. But once studs were found and furring strips attached to the ceiling, my job started with measuring and cutting out the 1/2" sheetrock that was to become the new ceiling. A day later, it's done! At least, that part of it - mudding and sanding are still to come, which means a few more days of sore shoulders and a neck!
The next big issue to tackle was the ceiling in the second bathroom upstairs, which fortunately for Dad and I is much smaller. That ceiling only took a few hours, no furring stripes needed (though I still have some smaller parts to screw up). The next job will be to put up new sheetrock on the cracked and water damaged walls, then a new tiling job.
The last job Dad and I tackled into the late evening last night was the dining room wall. The west wall, after years of the foundation settling** (see footnote), had cracked and bulged out considerably. Fortunately, the only thing holding it up was the fantastic wallpapering job my mom did years ago when we first moved into the house. But with nearly ten foot ceilings, this was no small job for me alone to do. Usually, when putting up new sheetrock - either over the older wall or after tearing down the plaster - I pull off the door & window trim and baseboards. No easy task given the fact the baseboards are 8 inches high and have a high tendency to break in half when trying to remove them. Note - when the builders put it up initially, they didn't want them taken off!
Once the walls were up, one last thing Dad wanted to tackle, and consequently giving me one more project to add to the already growing list. With the demand of hard wood floors in today's housing market, Dad wanted to see how rough the original hardwood floors in the dining room were. While the entire house has wood floors (some more finished/polished than others), we had them all re-carpeted when we bought the house back in 1991. So, with fingers crossed, we pulled back a section of the carpet in the dining room to discover that overall, the wood floor is in very good shape, despite needing a good cleaning and some small nails and staples (holding down the carpet tacks and padding) removed. Lucky for me, I don't think the floor will need to be sanded, only polished and maybe re-stained in some areas to match the original coloring of it. While it will be different to walk into that room and have no carpet, I agree with Dad's idea that the hardwood floors will add more appeal and value to the house in the long run.
And so the work continues...
