Breaking it Down

With the dining room mostly done, we've turned our attention to the hallway (well, we can't lose track of our plan this early in the year). The hallway is pretty large and we use it all the time, so to reduce the disruption of our daily lives somewhat, I decided to break the project up into smaller "rooms" to work on.

There are about five relatively distinct spaces, as you can see here (I added some labels to make it easier to describe where I'm working).

My plan is to start in the back hall and work my way forward to the entry, then up the stairs to the upstairs hall. There are two really hard bits to do, one of which is in the back hall (I'll show you in a second), and the other of which is in the stairwell, so this nicely splits up the worst work and puts some nice large expanses of easier (if boring) work in between.

Here's my starting point today: the back hall, partially cleared of the tools and stuff we dumped there while working on the dining room.

While I work on the hallway, Noel will be stripping the paint from that pile of woodwork there. And then moving on to the stuff that is in situ.

The hard bit in here is going to be this place where the ceiling plaster failed due to the former (now sealed up) leak in the roof.

We've dithered and discussed this quite a bit, and I think what we're going to do is cut in a drywall patch and call it done. This back hall ceiling will actually be lowered slightly when we redo the upstairs bathroom, to accommodate the drains, so it doesn't have to be anything fancy.

Much of the hall has patches like this bit of the Eastern wall, where the plaster keys have failed and the wall is spongy (and has fallen off in great chunks where the previous owners lowered the ceiling). Those are not quite a piece of cake to repair, but they are pretty predictable and I know what to do with them. The trick is to get the plaster sufficiently clean that the repairs will work.

And then there's the total cakewalk repairs, which are these nail holes. OK, yes, there are way more of them than seems reasonable for the average wall, but they are easy to repair and require no thought whatsoever.

I had been thinking of the archway we uncovered as being tricky, but basically it just needs its corbels replaced. Since we haven't yet chosen corbels for the house (I'd like to match the only remaining ones -- in the front bedroom), we're just putting up little blocks of wood to cover the holes left behind when they were removed, and leaving it at that for now.

Now to get to work scrubbing the thick layer of gunk off the wall (we're pretty convinced it's an early form of wall paint). Whee!

Technorati Tags: construction, paint removal, plaster, renovations

posted by ayse on 01/11/10