Author: turtle

not much happening here. i pottered around upstairs this weekend, looked at things, stripped some paint off the wainscote boards, and got back into bed:

it may not look like much, but all that paint, glue and spackle takes about 10 min per foot to remove from each piece. and when your nose is running, it’s difficult (and messy) wearing a respirator.

i also got the head and side casing cleaned up, and attached at the bathroom door (above right). the side casing is the same wood shown in the first photo of last week’s post, after stripping about 1/8″ of paint. it is beautiful tight grained smooth old wood (where it doesn’t have nail holes and dents).

i also finally finished painting the (hopefully repaired) leaky mouldy window, patched a couple of roof leaks from the last storm, cleaned out some gutters. sorry, no photos yet – maybe next post.

i’ve been on a bit of a grump about jm recently: not only did janeen miss a weekend to go on his ‘make money for jm’ cruise trip (nope, it wasn’t even a benefit), but when she came back she’s been sick! now i’m sick too, so not much has been happening around here.

last weekend, i was realizing just how slow it is to try to reuse wood. We have the old wood, covered in paint, chipped and dented with holes in it from nails. Then we need to strip it down to the wood to make sure there are no nails hiding in there that could become projectiles when i cut the wood or shape it with the router. Then we need to sand it, and fill all the dents and scratches. then sand again. then prime. aiiieee!

above left shows the wainscote in the bathroom with most of the paint stripped off it. i’m not sure if we’ll bother to strip it all off, because the left side will be behind the vanity (which i still need to make). On the right, i’ve started to install the door jambs. it took me a long time. the wall framing is not necessarily perfectly vertical, so the door jambs are shimmed away from it with wedge-shaped pieces of wood. I kept shimming the jambs, checking for level with the plumb bob (a heavy pointed metal piece attached to the end of a string), and then accidentally bumping them. there’s probably a better way.

Now this part feels like progress: To waterproof the shower, we are using a special waterproofing membrane made by schluter-kerdi that has a bondable surface so you can apply the tile directly to it. I like it because it keeps all the water out of the shower backing. Traditional showers have a layer of mortar over the top of the waterproofing membrane; the mortar never completely dries out between showers: mold. Although we used cement backer board everywhere, apparently this stuff allows you to use plaster (gypsum) board. On the left i’m putting in the bottom piece. it goes in quite easily: you press it down against a layer of thinset mortar. There’s also a special drain with a really wide flange that also has a bondable surface. The kerdi membrane adheres to this also. on the right, half the shower is covered. almost ready to tile.

Not much more to show, but I got the wall plastered. On the upper right you can see the difference between ‘plaster’ and drywall. Here I’m trying to show how shiny and reflective the plaster gets when it has been worked. Apparently plaster is much stronger and resistant to damage than drywall. I can believe it – it makes a hard shell on the surface of the wall. One thing that I really like about it is that it is a single application. No sanding needed (theoretically) – for me there’s some touch-up needed. hey, i’m not a pro!

The new sill that I started repairing on saturday is now installed, along with the trim. The plaster in the repaired area is still drying (it looks grey in the photo on the left). On the right, I’m starting to install the wainscote for the bathroom. It’s all reused wood that was on the walls before, so there are some interesting colors. I’ve stripped the paint off the grooves and edges of the boards so that they fit together. We’ll finish stripping the paint and preparing it while it’s in place.

Mole is out of town this weekend, so that leaves me to update. This weekend I concentrated on trying to get upstairs ready for paint. Actually, we’ve been working on that for months…
When uncle Ken came to visit last week, one of the first things he commented on was that in the bathroom, I’ve only used a single box to put the GFI (ground-fault interrupter) plug into. This box has a lot of wires in it, and GFI plugs take up more room than normal plugs. He recommended replacing the box with a double box and a ‘plaster guard’ on the front that reduces it for a single outlet. Exactly what the wiring book says, too. Should have read the instructions.

This turned out to be quite an effort. It’s always disappointing to have to tear apart work i’ve already done, too. We already had the gyp board up on one side of the wall, and the cement board on this side. fortunately i hadn’t plastered it yet.

when i installed the boxes the first time, i’d added a piece of wood as a backer to make it easier to screw the boxes in. unfortunately, since the wall is so thin, there was not space for this as well as the double box and the plaster guard. i had to tear out both boxes, and carefully drill out the piece of wood backer i’d installed – without damaging the drywall on the back side – then screw the boxes back in against the studs. getting them aligned and set at the right depth took quite a while.

Above left shows the boxes installed. Right is with the plaster guard on.

Ahh, backer board is back on. Had to move the hole over slightly because the plaster guard centers the opening on the double box and the stud set the location for the box. Above right shows the trim going back on around the door into the bedroom. Exciting… Janeen stripped the paint off the vertical piece months ago.

Got a new toy in the mail this weekend: a ‘dustless’ sander. It uses sanding screens and attaches to the vacuum cleaner, so the dust is sucked straight in. nice. except that the sanding motion and the constant air flow through the thing generates so much static electricity i felt like a spark plug! In the photo above right you can see the solution: i attached a piece of wire to the pole and fixed it to the plumbing. ahhh.

Plastered the bump-out in front of the chimney. ready for paint!

The rotten window. To fit a new sill on the inside of the window, I trimmed off the vertical pieces of wood on each side of the window flush with the top of the trim. Using a piece of scrap wood helped getting the saw aligned. Above right you can see the test-fitting.

I glued the new piece of wood to the old sill after trimming off the old rotten wood. To hold the pieces of wood together, I used ‘biscuits’. Using a specialized tool, these oval-shaped pieces of wood are really easy to install, and when glued, the join is quite strong. I’ll clamp it over night and attach it tomorrow…

i had big plans for the weekend: get the water for the kitchen hooked up (again), and start framing in the walls of the bathroom. didn’t quite get there, but we got most of the way.

after plastering the the bedroom wall, we noticed that it cracked when janeen jumped in the doorway! not promising. i’d noticed beforehand that when the plumber had installed the sewer pipes in the old bathroom, they had destroyed one joist, and left a second one next to it almost completely cut. i think this is the reason for much of the cracking in the wall – so this weekend i resolved to reinforce the joist that was in the worst shape, and runs under this wall.

janeen spent hours stripping layers of old paint from the old trim that goes around the bedroom door. difficult to see (maybe janeen will upload a better picture…) but theres green, gold, beige, white…

my second goal was to get the pipes connected into the kitchen. had to tear up the carpet to install them. when i was in the middle of pulling up the carpet, janeen said, “it just gets more and more ugly. when’s it going to start looking pretty?” soon. i hope.

didn’t quite get the pipes all connected up, but janeen did some framing.

we have been trying to reuse as much wood as we can. this means we spend a lot of time pulling out old nails, and unscrewing screws. so far, we have filled seven cans with nails.

We decided that even though the upstairs walls are really cool looking, with the distressed plaster and layers of stripped paint, we’d give it a nice coat of pink paint — in honor of my brother. No, really, this pink paint is called ‘PlasterWeld’ and it’s supposed to help the veneer plaster adhere properly to the walls. Our plan was to coat the walls and do the plastering this weekend. I got a bit distracted, as you’ll see.

Earlier in the week, our illustrious – and now even more prosperous – plumber dug up our driveway to repair the sewer pipe. Besides the ever increasing quotes, we didn’t realize that the plumber was planning to use the driveway to store piles of dirt dug out to get at the sewer pipe – for over a week. This ordeal is still not over. Hopefully tomorrow the building inspector will sign off on it without prompting any more cost escalation.

I had to shovel the piles to each side to squeeze the car out.


Meanwhile, back to the real project: The drainage pipes for the shower are finally in and finished.

Now on to getting water into the shower – since we’ve already removed the crazy piping on the outside of the house, we need to find a new shorter route inside the house. [above left: We can’t figure out why one would need to make this shape pipe?]

Extra pipe, anyone?

I tried to carefully cut out the gyp board from the ceiling in the lower level so i can reuse it after installing the plumbing pipes. Mostly successful, and plenty of plaster dust in my hair, ears, eyes, nose and mouth:

Janeen did loads of prep work getting the upstairs bedroom ready for plastering, and also started demolishing the funny dysfunctional closet beside the kitchen (only half of it was usable). If you’ve never tried it, there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to un-screw painted-over screws that have the head mostly worn out:

She found some rather cute little keys in the process, though.

The walls look pretty with the pink paint, eh?