We don’t have good “before” pictures of these areas, but the hallway ceiling, in particular, was in horrible shape. There had been some exposed pipes run to the upstairs sink, and the corner where they had penetrated the ceiling was a big, gaping hole. A long-ago leak had turned much of the lathe and plaster black, and most of the ceiling was cracked. Going over the whole thing with a smooth sheet of drywall has made such a difference…

Drywalled family room

Hallway ceiling remade

We have long questioned how far we wanted to go on this back bedroom, which was formerly Chloe’s room and is now destined to become our family room. The plaster is cracked in quite a few places, although to some extent that’s been mitigated by the multiple layers of wallpaper. On our ambitious days, we’ve talked about stripping off the wallpaper and repairing the plaster. In our more lazy moments, we’ve contemplated doing nothing and just moving a couch our TV into the room. But, as we’ve gotten really tired of shuffling things around our house as projects move from one area to the next, we did commit to not “temporarily” start using this room, a phrase that for us usually equates to at least two years before we fix it up.

Our compromise in this case was to remove all the trim, so that we can have someone (not us!) come in and install 1/4″ drywall over all the walls. While the plaster purists out there will be appalled, we just don’t have the time or patience right now to strip off all the wallpaper and fix up the plaster. I spent about 3 hours removing all the trim today as the first phase of this project, and tomorrow I’m going to call to get a quote on the drywall work. The salvageable trim will go to Houck’s for stripping, and we will install new base trim. One of the previous renters had a dog that did an amazing amount of damage to the base trim, so it was shot. We will probably take the picture rail to the Rebuilding Center, because I’d rather go with crown, and there is no other picture rail in the entire house. Anyway, once get the walls “restored,” we’ll refinish our stripped trim and replace the trim that wasn’t salvageable. And between getting a quote and actually getting the drywall up, I am going to rough in some wiring for the TV. Our goal is to have this room finished by the time Stephanie starts teaching again in late September.

And just now Stephanie asked me while cutting some vegetables in the kitchen whether “the final nail was in the coffin?” on the patio door idea. That was something we had tossed around for awhile…”wouldn’t it be nice if we replaced the back window with a door out the the patio?” This idea has long been stretched between our desire to streamline our projects and our bad habit of coming up with bright ideas. Keep posted to see which philosophy wins…

Much of yesterday and today was spent on home improvement store runs and clearing out Ginger’s room. I took this week off of work, and our goal is to have her room 100% done and the rest of the upstairs as close to that as possible. There are still little bits of trim work to do in all the rooms, and it’s amazing how many hours can be thrown into finishing a “done” space. My plan is to try to do all the sawing outside, to avoid kicking a bunch of dust into Chloe’s room, but today’s weather didn’t really cooperate with that idea. So, I opted to start the less fun task of starting to patch and mud the plaster walls on either side of the stairs. Our goal is to merge the 15 or so various textures on those two walls into a semi-cohesive look, even if it’s not perfect. And then we’ll paint the walls and rip the carpet off the stairs, so that they can be refinished. We’ve pretty much decided to hire someone else to do it, in line with our “save our sanity” plan that we committed to in our last post. Hopefully by paying for help on a few things we’ll squelch our desire to just move away from all these projects. Even today when dropping $400+ at lumber yards for “a few little things” to finish Ginger’s room, I was dreaming of how nice it’d be to be able to spend that money on something else…or even not spend it at all… So, without further ado, here’s the super-exciting kickoff picture…

This was the last of the plaster to come out of the kitchen.  While gutting a room is fun for the first 5 or 10 minutes, it always turns into a horrible, time-consuming project.  What made this particularly bad was the 40 year old blown-in insulation sitting above the kitchen ceiling.  Now that I have been through this a few times, I now realize that the best thing to do is to just leave the ceiling and insulation alone and to go over the whole thing with drywall.  Losing 1/2″ of height is a fair trade for less mess and not having to reinsulate…