Cracks & Holes

I worked for several hours in the stairwell today because there was beautiful, natural light coming in the window. Yesterday it was so dark and gloomy I couldn't do anything in there. I am filling in all the gaps left by the guy who put up my drywall the other day. I have gone through a whole gallon of mud now and have to wait til Christmas is over to get another. Except for the rickety scaffold I enjoy doing this--making rough places smooth and filling in holes. It's the sanding part I hate. I'm going to skim coat the entire drywalled area (I know, I should use plaster!) and then seal it good before I paint or paper. I just hate the look of drywall--especially roller-painted drywall.

For a change of pace, here's something that fell out of the ceiling when we took the old drywall down.



Looks pretty good, actually. Reminds me of things my mother used to make.

Another thing that fell out of the ceiling was a cancelled rent check from 1960 that shows the party rented my house for $100.00 a month!

Above my stairwell ceiling is a large empty space and a "secret room" that the FO's kids used to play in. We found a Michael Jackson poster and lots of books and a folding chair in there. The books are all school-type books, of which there were a lot dumped down the wall chases in the attic for some unknown reason. There were some lurid True Crime type paperbacks, too. I have also found two ancient croquet balls up there. Can you imagine what that sounded like when those kids were rolling those around? It was bad enough when we had squirrel races under the floorboards every morning before we fixed the big roof hole.

You Get What You Pay For

This week my sometimes helper (the ex) came over to help me put drywall on the ceiling and side wall of my stairwell. Well it proved too much for my ladder and plank scaffold setup and our shaky legs and my girly center of gravity so he suggested he call a friend who does this for a living. Today he and the friend show up and I have drywall in about 15 minutes. Now all I had were some leftover pieces--not nice 4x8's because SOMEONE never would bring the drywall in from the garage for years and it got all warped and I had to take it to a dumpster. Man, I wish that stuff was lighter and easier to haul upstairs!

After they left I got a good look at what they did. . . . . . . . . . . . . . only about 3 screws in each piece. No wonder they were done so fast. So I spent a shaky hour trying to screw in drywall with a heavy screw gun over my head on a plank between two ladders--something I didn't want to have to do. This admittedly looks like a jigsaw puzzle, so I'm going to have to use a lot of mud and tape to make it look good. Fortunately, I'm pretty good at that. Sure wish I had that original plaster up there, though.

Back to Work

Today I finally got a helper for a few hours so I put him to work taking down some ceiling drywall in the front stairwell. Here are some before shots.





That drywall was put up by the FO who was not handy at all and is not a nice job. I also have to move the light box, so taking it all down and starting over seemed the best bet. I'm also nailing lath to the inside of the wall on the left in the above pic and then putting drywall over it to make the walls the same density and thickness as the undisturbed ones.

Hopefully the helper will be back on Sunday and we can put up the new drywall. Then its skim coating it all and patching the plaster walls (being stripped of wallpaper residue and scrubbed in the pictures). I also have already scraped paint off the oak window and stair trim in this stairwell, so will be sanding and varnishing it, too.

This whole thing started up again because I got the perfect light fixture for this spot and didn't want to hang it in such an ugly space. It's looked like this for over 12 years and I need to finish something. Well, not finish exactly..... I still need to find a finish carpenter to build a bookcase in the parlor that makes a wall to this space and case in the exposed framing beams of which you can see one in the above pic. There is also a missing bottom step into the parlor that needs to be built.

This opening was created when I took down the wall the FO had added to separate this stairwell from the parlor while it was the front entrance for the upstairs apartment. A former entry shows this entrance. Who knows what happened to the built-in bookcase!?

Here's the earliest picture I have of the house from the WPA city project of 1929. All the houses in the city were photographed and surveyed for the tax assessor. A wonderful resource.

Also showing in the right rear is the former barn. The shingles were stained red originally, with black and light yellow trim. The first floor was red brick, so the house looked rather monolithic. I chose to go with a lighter palette when I painted it. I don't know what to do, yet, about the painted brick and foundation. The FO's handiwork. He said the brick "was dirty" so he painted it.

The oval window leads to my "secret room" above the stairs. It is in the overhang from the oval window to the closet in the master bedroom (with the double windows). If I knocked out the side wall in the closet I would be in it. Entrance now is gained through the attic and down a ladder, but I am going to take out a bookcase in the morning room (in the front corner) and gain entrance that way. Then the oval window will actually be in a room. I'll make the whole thing a closet. There was a closet where the bookcase is now, but when the third owners turned the upstairs into an apartment for some reason they put a bookcase in the closet entrance. Since the secret room is about 18 inches above the second floor level, my new closet will have a step up to it. There are at least 4 unused spaces in this house, owing to the overhangs and roof pitch, and I plan to use another one under the attic stairs for a built-in dresser in the bathroom.