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 :)