Sunday, October 11, 2009

More on that southwest corner

But picking up where I left the narrative in the southwest corner: after jamming in Styrofoam as a base, I squirted in urethane foam to fill in the spaces. This part of the wall has sustained a lot of water damage both inside and out, so there's a lot more space inside it than there should be. From the outside, it will need some bricks and lots of mortar, but I'm getting better at masonry. (So more on the outside later this week, I hope - but first there will be some plain old drywalling, probably tomorrow.)

At any rate, the next step in providing a real wall was mortar into that crack. This took place concurrently with the window patching of the last post and the result was less blurry in person than this picture would indicate. Note also that I've started to patch the cracks in the plaster to the left of the window.

Above the window, the plaster had come loose from the wall, but was still relatively solid, so I used my adhesive caulk to glue it back to the wall. Not a technique that I would recommend for a wall that is intended to be smooth at the end of the process, but for my purposes, a nice white wall that gives some indication of its history, it's probably ideal.

Here's the corner as it appears today. There's plaster in the cracks above the window, I'm using plaster to smooth out the mortar, and the south end of the west wall is almost done; there were some seriously large cavities there, but not really large enough to justify mortar, so I'm filling them in with multiple applications of patching plaster. And obviously, the white paint has already encroached on the corner area.

I'll sand all this plaster tomorrow and see where it needs more fill. Also tomorrow, I hope, will be drywall on the frame section of the south wall (where the garage door used to be). Above the dark beam (that supported a rail for the garage door) the plaster is in seriously bad condition, again having disengaged from the wall and cracked. I'm not yet sure how I'll handle that. Probably more caulk and plaster patch; it's working very well elsewhere.

This corner is going to look great.

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