Java & Plaster

The sheetrock & plaster finisher found a creative way to use the built-in drawers in my bathroom. He plonked a scrap of sheetrock on it and used it as a counter for his coffee maker. I love it!

I think this photo says it all… The sheetrock and plaster work at my house began a week and a half ago, and will extend into next week… BIG job. They have worked in every room, including two stairwells, except the kitchen, which is far from ready to close up just now. They put all new board in the bathroom – walls and ceiling – and they covered all the bedroom ceilings with new sheetrock. The plaster wasn’t in the best shape, and at some point the ceilings had been textured, so it was easier, and to my taste, aesthetically preferable, to just put new sheetrock up and be done with the ceilings.

The walls in the bedroom that I had dubbed “the blue room” since it had been painted this really awful dark royal blue, were in pretty bad shape with thin, rough plaster, and quite visible repairs on all four walls. The repairs looked like jagged bumpy scars. The sheetrock guys decided the best plan for that room was to sheet rock the ceiling and skim coat the entire room. That seemed like the best plan to me, since covering the walls with sheetrock would cause problems with the woodwork on the two windows and two doors in that room. In this situation, you have three options:

1. You half-ass it and just butt the sheetrock up to your woodwork and lose 1/2″ of depth on the wood, which isn’t acceptable to me on any level.

2. You remove all the woodwork, hang the board, and then make shims to allow for the 1/2″ of extra wall thickness that wasn’t there before, which is a pain, and requires time and patience and carpentry (and right
now, my #1 carpenter is my electrician, so that’s not an option!)

3. Or joy of joys, you strip all the plaster and lath off the walls and replace it with new board. Um, just NO. BTDT in two rooms already, not interested…

So skim coating it is. Now there is nothing left in the blue room that is blue except the radiator.

The only thing left of the hideous blue is the paint on the radiator.

The other two bedrooms just look neater and cleaner with flat ceilings. And I swear they look larger besides. Either way, I got rid of the textured ceilings. Hooray!

The bathroom went through the biggest changes from its original configuration to its current one. We moved tub out from under the window, moved the sink to a different wall, removed and salvaged the wall tile, stripped the walls and ceiling of all the plaster and lath, re-plumbed, re-wired, used the open wall to run all the second floor electrical through, and added a small wall to bookend my new/old bathtub.

So here we have some pretty cool before and after pics of the bathroom.

Originally the tub was positioned lengthwise along the window wall in the bathroom, making a shower modification impossible without removing the window or destroying it quickly with water from the shower.

This is the bathtub that we had to smash to bits in order to remove it from the second floor bathroom. We tossed the bits out the window into a wheelbarrow and wheeled them to the dumpster I had parked in the driveway.

They had a 60″ sink cabinet against an interior wall, which we removed and re-positioned the new bathtub/shower in its place.

This interior wall was perfect for a tub/shower enclosure - with a little re-plumbing and a lot of grunt-work.

Now, the window is under no threat of water damage (!!), and the tub is in its own little nook between the existing wall and the new wall we framed in.

We added recessed lights in the shower, moved the vanity light (of course), and added a center light for general lighting in the room itself. While we had the walls and ceiling open, we also installed an exhaust fan.

And after having lived in too many places where the lights dim when I plug in my hair dryer, I have two 20-amp GFIs over the sink and another 20-amp outlet in the corner beside the radiator. Overkill? Maybe. But I can guarantee you I will never have to run down two flights of stairs to throw a breaker because I maxed it out trying to dry my hair. It’s those little things in life that make me happy.

The tub/shower enclosure in its new position. You can see the new wall we framed on the right side of the tub. I can hardly wait until I can get the tile laid and the floor sanded and finished. That first hot bath will be the best ever!

So, moving downstairs, the guys did some patching in the stairwell, and sheetrocked the living room and sitting room ceilings. I had tried to scrape the texture off of them, hoping to save a little money, but the plaster was in such bad shape (again), that it wasn’t salvageable. So we removed a few pieces of crown molding from the wood columns in those rooms, and they covered the ceilings with new board. The walls received quite a bit of attention as well – patching and repairing. The dining room ceiling had already been covered with sheetrock, so all they had to do in that room was some repair and patching. Still quite a bit of work…

Looking into the sitting room from the living room, you can see the new ceilings, and the plaster repair. We had to remove the top trim piece from the woodwork so that the sheetrock would go up above it. When we replace that top piece, it will look as if nothing was ever done to the ceiling.

My poor house with the window removed. It looks so ugly and abused.

The rooms in my house are pretty large – the downstairs rooms are up to 13′ x 15′ and the upstairs rooms are up to 13′ x 14′. To minimize the patching and the number of joints, they wanted to use 14 and 16-foot board. No problem downstairs, but what to do upstairs? My staircase turns at a landing, and is less-than-generous in width, so the only option was to bring the rock through an upstairs window.

Well that sounded simple until my dad and I started trying to disaasemble the damn thing. This is where things tend to get hairy with older homes… just when you think ‘no problem, that’s a piece of cake’… guess what. The house throws you a curve. This one in the form of a window that had been put together like a Chinese puzzle. AGH! I figured the window would be like other windows I’ve dealt with. Remove the out stops, remove the bottom window. Remove the inner stops, remove the upper window. Done.

Oh, but NO. It started out simple enough – we removed the first set of stops and the bottom window came out no problem. But to get the top window out was a whole other set of gyrations. We removed the woodwork, the sill, the outer stops, the boards that cover the weights and pulleys, the aluminum trim on the outside, the outer wood trim, broke a couple pieces in the process (dammit), and then FINALLY we got the upper window out.

This was fun to watch. These guys are so good at what they do. The entire load went in without a hitch.

We covered it with a flimsy piece of paneling that we had pulled off the kitchen walls and had the presence of mind to keep in the garage “just in case.” This was definitely a “just in case” moment since the temperature was going to drop over night, and it was going to rain.
Lovely.

The entire load of sheetrock and concrete board suspended mid-air. This is no circus act. These guys do this every day. Unreal.

So the next day this huge truck wiggles itself under the power lines and into my driveway to deliver the sheetrock. Holy mackerel! I so appreciate the guys who do that kind of work. They have to be precise and careful, they have to make sure the homeowner understands the potential damage that their truck can do to the property, and they have to pull unbelievably heavy sheetrock off of a dangling crane without killing themselves or anyone else. And they have to be aware of the weight they are piling up in a concentrated area of a second floor.

I scooted upstairs and took this shot from inside the master bedroom where these guys were unloading. It actually looked less tenuous from this vantage point.

The one guy told me that in new-builds they have to be really careful because often the joists are farther apart than the standard 16″ on center, and they are using flake board instead of plywood. So if they stack sheetrock where it is sitting vertically, and is parallel with the joists, the weight of it can push right through the flake board and the whole load will end up on the first floor. Reason #537 to renovate…. (OK, so I tell myself that to make me feel better – let me have my little reality, huh?)

So the work on the sheetrock continues – I expect it will be finished this week. They are down to final coats and sanding downstairs and final sanding upstairs, so it should be done soon.

My parents and I are taking a much-deserved vacation to the Jersey Shore for Memorial Day. I haven’t taken an entire week off for a vacation in probably 20 years, and the three of us haven’t taken a vacation together in probably longer than that. So we are all looking forward to sticking our toes in the sand and relaxing.

Actually the last time I was at the shore, my mom and I went for Labor Day weekend last year. I had put my offer in on my house the day before we left, and I found out that it had been accepted as I was sitting on the beach enjoying the sunshine. Mom and I spent the rest of the time renovating that house in our heads. It was her idea to switch the bathroom fixtures around like we did. She is brilliant.

So I know that about 1-2 days into our vacation, we will begin planning and strategizing our next moves. Once the sheetrock is done, there are four big chunks of work that have to be done before the house is ready for paint and finish electrical work.

1. finish the electrical upstairs

2. get the kitchen ready for sheetrock, which means finish the plumbing, finish the electric, remove all the woodwork, and get rid of all the remaining plaster and lath bits that are leftover (plus about a dozen other small tasks)

3. freshen and/or refinish all the woodwork

4. tile the bathroom and kitchen

Yeah, I’m ready for a vacation!

Originally posted May 23, 2010