there were so many photos from this weekend that i’ve been putting off making a post. i was going to post the photos and no text and say, “figure it out!” but now that i’m typing…
i’m still in the middle of “destroying” this room and making it as ugly as possible. after the sanding it was time for the loose plaster to come down.
i screwed in plaster washers to hold cracks and edges in place.
my cousin larry came over to help; i put him to work sanding this slatted door from upstairs. (left, photo taken after the sanding was done. he’ll be back next weekend to paint it!) it was nice having someone work with me in my demolition room. mathew has spent the last few weekends, mostly in the garage, working on electrical/rewiring stuff. in the evening another cousin, jon and his wife florence and their two kids, makayla and malachi dropped by to see the house and go out to dinner with larry. of course, as usual, i forgot to take photos of our guests… and they brought yummy snacks. (right) here i am sitting with a wall where i’ve removed the plaster in a perfect line so that the new repairing gypboard can be screwed to half of the stud and the remaining plaster can be screwed to the other half. (does that make any sense?)
mathew installing yet another electrical outlet and finding a weird panel attached to the wall where he thinks a heater might have once lived. and we also discovered this weird green wallpaper on two of the walls in this room. previous owners had put a plaster skim coat over it but it wasn’t holding that well and easily chipped off. so the room gets even uglier…
my sunday started with a lot of plaster skim-coat removal. after making a royal mess i got tired of working by myself and went down to the garage to see what mathew was doing.
i found him in the garage causing trouble… i mean cutting lots and lots of holes in the ceiling. adding outlets upstairs means running wires in the floor below the living room. he also spent the entire day doing rewiring and fixing electrical stuff that wasn’t done correctly by the previous owners. (do you see a pattern?)
mathew thought it would be better for my morale if i worked downstairs with him in the garage. so then instead of demolition i was put on construction duty, cutting and installing 2x4s for a partial retrofit of the garage. there are these precariously placed steel beams in the garage that in an earthquake could fall over. i helped to make them safer (and felt quite manly in the process) by securing them to the floor above.
(left) after that bit of retrofitting i replaced the mesh on a window screen. (right) at 7:30 i’d had enough fun in the garage, but mathew kept rewiring until close to 10 pm. it wasn’t something that could wait, our tenant would have been without electricity!
hope everyone had a nice weekend. (next time i’ll cut down on the sarcasm…)