Walls Once Again

Yesterday was quite the day. I mean, in addition to Gene coming over and helping us from morning until after dark as we threw drywall liberally about the dining room, I also managed to knock over and break my laptop which has served me faithfully through years of architecture school and a 250-mile commute and dangerous studios and many other falls on the floor. So everything is a lot slower now because Noel fixed the problem by performing a heroic lappyotomy and putting my hard drive in his old laptop, which has a faster processor but half the RAM.

Friends, it turns out that Photoshop, which I use for hours every day and especially for putting these posts together, uses quite a bit of RAM. So everything is very slow right now. Also, this laptop has has a funny space bar so I have to go back and edit everything to add the spaces it randomly leaves out.

Anyway, whining aside, we had an awesome day of work yesterday, and we have been totally suffering for it today.

This is where we started: we'd stripped the room halfway of plaster and lath, had pulled the old knob-and-tube wiring out and replaced it and the even iffier more modern stuff with safe, code-exceeding wiring, and Noel had done some crazy dirty work removing the mysteriously extensive collection of cast iron pipes running all over the attic and going nowhere.

That was the room about an hour before Gene showed up, as we were clearing away the wiring supplies and other junk littering the floor in preparation for what pros call "rocking" the room.

Here's a brief tour of some of the stuff we'd been doing (in between pulling lath nails). We had this crazy switch by the side door. There were two switches: one for the room light, one for the outside porch light. And on the other side of the wall on the porch was a light switch which turned on the porch light, so anybody outside the house could turn on the light. It was wired up in a way that could only be described as a major hazard, so we fixed that.

This is what the hole now looks like on the side porch. I'm not sure how we'll go about hiding it, or if we'll even bother. We're planning to completely change how that wall works at some point and it's probably not worth fussing with the siding until we're done with that. This spot is (mostly) protected from the weather, anyway.

Friday night Noel spent a few hours up in the dropped ceiling of the pantry, cutting those random pipes out. There were so many of them, it was almost ridiculous. By the time he came down from there (notice there are still some pipes when I took this photo, above his head and just a couple bays to the right of him), he looked like he was a coal miner.

I took some reference photos in the kitchen ceiling (dropped when they closed off the door to the old butler's pantry, I think) and pantry ceilings, but mostly to be able to know what the framing there is like. The ceilings in both rooms appear to be held on with a lot of optimism and possibly by shear ignorance of the law of gravity.

Then I said goodbye to my favourite part of having the walls down, which has been the view into the dining room through these holes in the hallway plaster.

With Gene there, we made quick work of the drywall. I admit that I'm not much help on this kind of project because I lack the upper-body strength and height to make a really solid worker. But I'm going to get my workout on the taping and mudding and plaster repair to come.

In some ways the ceiling was the easiest part of the drywall to do: it was mostly square (for 1876 values of square) and we had the drywall lift graciously on loan from Gene to help us out. We started working after 10am (at the last minute we realized we didn't have nearly enough drywall screws so there was a panic run to Pagano's), and got the last panel up just before 3pm.

We had a brief break for lunch, then powered through on the walls.

Apart from one little patch that we left undone (you can juuuust see it in the upper right of this photo), we got all the drywall up before 6pm. The change in the room felt really nice last night, but this morning, in the daylight, it was spectacular.

We spent much of the day today cleaning the room up: vacuuming dust and dirt, washing the floor a couple times, putting tools away. And complaining about our aching backs.

And now that we've got this room almost there, I admit that one thing is tickling me, which is this:

Around the edge of the room where we pulled off the molding, you can see the plywood they threw over the old floor, and it is so tempting to consider pulling it off and sanding the old floor. If it weren't that the condition of the floor underneath could be so bad that we'd regret it, I'd be there with the pry bar right now. As it is, I just look at that every time I walk by and daydream.

Technorati Tags: construction, drywall, electrical work, flooring, plumbing, renovations

posted by ayse on 11/08/09