The dining room we tore apart to renovate finally looks like a room again. After finishing the mudding and taping of sheetrock, which I discussed in last week’s post, we moved right on to priming and painting the room. We used a Wagner paint sprayer to apply the primer to the ceiling and walls. And by “we,” I mean mostly my husband Erik. I read the detailed instructions to him while he monkeyed with the…
Busy, busy, busy. Now that the tearing apart phase of our dining room renovation is finished, we’ve been spending the past couple of weeks on the putting together phase. After the building inspector okayed the tear-down and framing part of the job, which had us inserting a few extra two-by-fours in corners so we’d have something to attach sheetrock to, we got right on putting up insulation. We also used spray foam around the windows,…
Work continues on our dining room renovation project. Since my last post on the topic, we have taken out all the plaster and lath. In fact, that dirty job ended up being a bit bigger than we expected. Some of the lath along the south wall went behind the front wall of the closet. As Erik attempted to remove it, plaster inside the closet fell off the wall. We didn’t intend to redo the closet,…
Posting a little late today. That’s because I spent the entire day taking plaster off the ceiling in our dining room. Whew, what a dirty job! I did not take a “before” picture (just imagine an expanse of white plaster), but here are some “after” photos. While tearing plaster off the walls was messy, it wasn’t as messy as we expected. The ceiling was another thing altogether. The dirt and debris sifting down through the…
Removing the plaster and lath in our dining room continues. I’m doing most of the plaster removal and cleanup while Hubby removes the lath and some of the harder-to-remove plaster. Back in the early 2000s, when we were remodeling other rooms in the house and removing the plaster and lath, I learned one trick that could help remove the plaster more easily: Breaking the keys. That sounds mysterious, like snapping a bunch of skeleton keys…