Wall Washing Wonderland
The hallway walls needed washing. They've needed washing for some time, but it's been put off because of things in the hallway or other projects or other things getting in the way.
As you can see, the hallway is very very dark with the plywood over the window opening while we wait for our new window. This is before I cleared the hallway out.
I moved everything -- our pile of things to give away and various tools -- out of the way, because we had invited people over to help us with the walls today. We can in theory do a lot of this work alone, but people ask us all the time to let them help us with the house, so we try to make it something not too terrible and where they can really help us rather than mostly hinder us. Wall washing seems to fit that bill.
Noel worked on scraping paint off the wall -- on one part there was some dark green paint on top of the old chalky paint that needed a heat gun to come off. The nice new Baker scaffolding was very handy for working on: much nicer than a ladder.
This is Tim, scraping the plaster over the front parlour door. At some point we decided to take out the plywood to get more light inside, and it made a huge difference.
And Kate, caressing the newly scrubbed wall.
I was doing mostly the first pass at scraping, working with a spray bottle (of which we suddenly did not have enough) and scraping the bulk of the paint off the wall to make it less gross to wash. Helping me out were Goldie and George. George came with Tim and Kate.
We made amazing progress today. I was not expecting to get as far as the stairs, given how slow some of the other parts of this work have been, but the inside wall was a fast wash, and having the scaffolding meant we could get up high and do the work easily, without hauling a ladder around.
Not only did we make good progress, but the walls, cleaned off, look a million times better. It really was an amazing transformation.
posted by ayse on 03/04/12