Damn, that's nice tin

By the end of the night, Jaimee and a friend had gotten all the loose paint off and knocked the plaster off of the ceiling to expose the brick.  It really looks great!

The mortar in the brick has some holes and gaps, though.  I bought some concrete fix stuff to patch it, but I'm not sure that's right.

 

I drywalled off the area above the cabinets we built in 2008 - pics later.

We spent some time cleaning up but need to do more tonight, as of course the dust is now everywhere.  And apparently Loki isn't smart enough not to eat paint chips.

What a mess.

This weekend's work started out quite nicely. We hung pictures in the living room, and cleaned out the scary room next to the kitchen. The living room looks much homier now! And then it just all went messy from there...

Max came over and helped on Sat. It took him an hour to do what would have taken me a full day - go Max! He pulled off all the baseboards in the dining room, so we can extend the drywall we put in to the floor (Dad, should I pull off the doorframe too?). Unexpectedly, this released a HUGE cloud of plaster dust. I don't know why I didn't think that would happen. Luckily the room was already taped off with plastic sheets as I was sanding down the first layer of patching I did... Anyway, quite the mess. It's also pretty ugly:


And then the paint removal started in the scary room off the kitchen. It has a tin ceiling - gorgeous! - and the paint was literally falling off. Because it's tin, all of the paint had to come down, since we can't just patch spots. Paint removal isn't pretty. A lot of the paint came down with a scraper (wielded by 3 friends!) and a lot of muscle, and Peel Away Smart Strip is hopefully removing the remainder as we speak. Though it too will take a lot of scraping and will make a big mess in removing. The worst part though was the discovery of several holes in the tin. It's no big deal to order new panels - my pattern is pretty common - but I'm truly scared of what I'll find under there when I go to replace it! It definitely rusted for a reason. I have some crossed fingers that whatever leaked has been fixed - but I'm so not holding my breath on that one...

Clean clean clean!

Yes! For once, we ended the weekend with the overall house slightly cleaner than it was before the weekend! Finally we may have broken the cycle!

The wallpaper paste removal began in the hallway, thanks to a good friend. It looks much better (though the wall itself needs lots of work), and no longer makes me shudder when I brush against it. The removal makes a pretty big mess though, so we washed the walls and scrubbed the hallway floors - sparkling! We have to figure out how to get to the area over the stairs. We have some ideas, but any others would be gratefully accepted.

Thanks to more good friends, the basement is now as clean as a basement will be (though despite urging, I still think we will not be holding Thanksgiving in the 'torture room' in the basement). We re-arranged, vacuumed, cleaned up debris, and hooked up the dryer.

I started investigating the crappy portion of the ceiling in the dining room. It looks like they tried to replaster at some point, but the plaster is very gritty and doesn't look too sturdy. Kind of looks like crumbly cement. I'm going to try to repair it with setting-type joint compound, as several sites have recommended. If that doesn't work I'll have to just take it down and put a piece of drywall up there.

Erin did some sanding on that wall - and then an absolutely marvelous job of cleaning the dust (some of which was still there from original drywall sanding!). Although the dining room will become messy again very soon, it feels much more relaxed to me...

New low-flow showerheads are up! Haven't checked w/Erin yet, but mine is a vast improvement over the one that was there.

And yes, I'm still flipped out about the waterbug Erin had to hunt down in her room on Thursday night. We've sprayed with this Orthomax stuff from Home Depot, hope it works. Next step is to sprinkle boric acid up in the attic. I'm accepting volunteers for that - extra beer for hazard pay...