Drywall ..,.

This weekend we worked on getting the old openings ready for new trim…

We packed the wall out to support the drywall & trim.

Cut and replaced the gouged and uneven area of the old door frame.

And in filled with drywall. The current drywall is 1/2″ proud as it was laminated over the old plaster, partially burying the trim. Packing these areas out recreates the proper wall to trim relationship.

And of course, next comes the spackling!

Here is the window as of Sunday night.

We also denailed all the old trim so it can be salvaged, which is not a fun process but the old trim is pretty.

An interesting find, the old carpenters wrote their notes all over the backs of the old trim, very cool.

Spackley Mud Fun

A night of spackle/ plastering/ mudding last night left us too tired to even post. Rare. So here’s the update you’ve been waiting for….
Remember the lump in our hall wall I tried to fix with plaster washers, but ended up ripping out? Then remember how the mini project stalled at that point? Here it is today, lumpy as ever, but covered up:

Here’s the NEW hole we made at another lump, in the bedroom. This one was filled in almost immediately though. Yes we sketch on our walls:

Here’s the ceiling with some of the lesser-known constellations, made of plaster washers. We considered laminating or furring the ceiling with drywall but I felt a twinge of guilt about covering up even more plaster and somehow convinced us to just smoothe it out:

Obvs Rob loves the idea. You can see the one area though we did end up patching in with drywall:

Here it is with the first coat of plaster mud spackle.

Just like with painting, one coat does not a spackle job complete. Have to sand, coat, sand and possibly another coat before priming.

Prime Power

Tonight the power three (Rob, my dad and I) did a power (three) hour and finished spackling, sanding and of course… Primed! We primed the upper closet, shown here, and all the lower closets:

Primed the orange room:

Primed in the little bedroom:

…which wasn’t even on the agenda.

High five, us. Demo to priming in a month!

One Down, Two To Go

Tonight we got the first coat of joint compound on everything and taped all the joints.

For all the plaster joints we used the powder setting-type joint compound. It’s stronger, has less shrinkage (important for large joints), and sets up faster.

Kelly’s Dad was up again tonight to help out. Here he is spackling the upper closet. Thanks Bill!

2nd Floor Thermostat Relocation

As part of the closet project we had to relocated the 2nd floor thermostat which we installed in Fall 2009, so we decided to move it to our bedroom.

Here is our already crowded bedroom wall…

We had to pull new wire from the air handler, down the hall, and into the bedroom wall.

Here I just finished the terminations at the air handler …

And we are now back up and running!

With our intercoms & all our thermostats several rooms look like this, but at least all the devices are stacked! : /

Closets are Rocked! Pt 2

While Kelly went to her cousin’s baby shower with her Mom, her dad was kind enough to come over and help drywall… And he is fast so we got a lot done!

Brand new framing for the pocket closet door in the small bedroom. Notice the shims over the old lath to level out the wall.

All sheetrocked!

Closets are Rocked! Pt 1

In just two weeks, we demo’ed, framed, wired, and sheet rocked our new closets! That is lightning fast for us!

Here is the linen closet,

All sheetrocked!

And the guest bedroom closets.

1, 2, 3 GWB

Along with a bunch of other things like pulling wires and planting mums, a good portion of drywall (GWB) went up today with the help of my dad/ his pickup truck:

It was a literal labor day:

We’re exhausted:

(Dang duct tape trying to steal the spotlight! All he did all day was watch.)