Plaster downstairs in the carriage house

So I've been intimating for some time that the plaster on the walls downstairs in the carriage house has some water damage. Here's a little indication of how much damage I mean: this is on the northeast corner next to where I replaced the termite-eaten door. [from last year]It's easy getting the rotten plaster off - but you'd better be wearing a mask, because the dust it releases is nasty in many different ways. I've found that it makes me cough for a day, but then makes me truly ill for about three, by which I mean feeling feverish and having troubles with depression. Clearly there's things in it that Just Aren't Good For You.

Anyway, after knocking all that off about two weeks ago, last week I knocked off the rotten plaster in the southeast corner, the so-called "closet" (because it naturally should be a closet). Problem there is that on the east side of the south wall, that was all the plaster. I suspect this is because of the gutter downspout they routed across the face of the wall to the alley [original post from 2009]- I think that leaked and dissolved first the mortar on the outside, then (as night follows day) the plaster on the entire inside of the wall. Probably took it ten years. Note, by the way, the steel rail still hanging there; I'd bent the last bolt holding it on last year and gave up in disgust; this year, not tired by having my arms above my head for the previous five bolts, this one came out pretty easily.

This is probably most of the plaster I'll have to remove. There's a little at the bottom of the wall behind the washer and dryer, but that's it. The north wall was more protected, it appears.

So tonight I got started on replacing the plaster. Here's the amount of plaster added after two episodes of Star Trek Voyager (thanks, Paramount and Netflix!). You can't see it well here, but the base coat is about a quarter-inch thick in most places; there are places where the bricks project a little more where the base coat is only an eighth of an inch or so.

The amount I got done looks kind of pathetic, but I'm getting quicker as I go, and it was tricky maneuvering the plaster trowel in the corner, so I think the rest of the wall will go faster than this makes it look.

But worst case, Voyager has a lot of episodes.

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with how this is coming out. The resulting base coat is pretty bumpy because I'm really not very skillful applying it yet. I'm going to try a top coat and see if I can't do a little better with that, but I'm not going to be all broken up if it's not perfect. The rest of the plaster down here is pretty sad, having been modified and patched a lot over the last century. This base coat's already about as good as the rest of it. So this is great practice!

Plaster work

So I thought I'd share some of my plaster work with you. I'm getting less bad at it, especially when I'm just doing the base coat (ha). Anyway, recall that we just put the gutters on the carriage house - as I mentioned in a comment on the last post, the lack of gutters caused rain to soak the east wall, and result after six weeks of freaking downpour (ask the folks along the Mississippi about the results of that) was a pervasive moldy, musty smell.

One culprit is pictured here.

Over the last 130 years, parts of the east wall have migrated about half an inch further east, resulting in a crack along the side of the stairway and damaging the plaster adjacent to the joists. The result is that air from between the layers of brick, redolent with 130 years of wet spiderwebs and other organic debris, can escape into the interior of the house. At the extreme upper right, you see part of the ductwork that had been nailed between two joists; the problem with this is that the last time the upstairs apartment was renovated, they clearly forgot that there was a register there, and left it covered with linoleum without cutting and replacing the register.

No, the top of the stairs is not a good place for that.

And this last week, the inevitable finally happened: an innocent bystander put their foot through it. Once it was open, the smell from the aforementioned joist flaws wafted up through the register hole... I'd been working on this all week, actually, trying to locate the mold smell and get it under control. The large area of exposed brick you see in the picture up there was after I took a hammer to the loose plaster.

And here you see it after I'd applied the base coat. Isn't that much nicer? Anyway, this picture also shows the wire coming in for the security light. My goal was to put a switch on the inside so I could turn that off without a ladder - so that little arched area was still open. And after all the rain, it didn't smell so hot, either.

The answer was clearly to replace the wooden insert (which I cleverly saved - although it took a 15-minute search to find it, since I'd taken it out about a year and a half ago).

Here's the result - I wasn't sure how best to anchor the wooden insert, so I toenailed it with finishing nails, then drove in a couple of shims at the top to really hold it in place. It seems to have made it solid enough.

I also stuck in some fiberglass insulation. After I get back to Menard's I'll squirt in some foam, too (the fiberglass didn't really get down into the corners at all).

So. My first real post in months. Didn't that feel good?

Storm coming

I can't wait to see my new carriage house gutters in action!

State of the carriage house

I just took a spin around the carriage house and listed everything I thought needed done.

Interior:

Upstairs and stairwell:

• Door trim - Bondo, caulk, paint
• Paint door, some caulk needed
• Remount banister, paint
• Paint stairs and entry door
• Quarter-round next to stairs
• Walls in stairwell, upper hall, kitchen - plaster, paint
• Register in hall
• Top coat on window #2 trim
• Hall floor - new linoleum, quarter-round
• Kitchen window
• Fridge nook floor
• Cabinet door and bottom in kitchen
• Cabinets - patch with Bondo and paint
• Yellow tile on wall: remove, scrape glue, paint
• Attic access: insulate, paint
• Bathroom sink drain
• Medicine cabinet
• Blue tile: remove, scrape glue, paint
• Paint entire bathroom
• Recaulk tub
• Realign and finish faucet
• Paint interior of closet
• Floor: new linoleum, quarter-round
• Reglaze hall cabinet
• Front room: three places still require plaster patching, paint touch-up
• Paint doors in front room and hall (strip old paint, primer, paint)

Downstairs:

• Closet nook: remove rotten plaster, replaster, paint, do something with floor
• Remove remaining track on S wall, finish sealing and paint above old S door
• Plaster at top of old S door
• Remove drywall ceiling, insulation on north end of ceiling
• SW window: insulated board, a little more plaster.
• Replace S window (with screen)
• Screen on W window
• Finish trimming carpet
• 1x2"trim on W wall. Caulk, paint.
• N wall - plaster, paint
• E window - finish wiring of outdoor and indoor outlets, lots of plaster, paint
• Wire lights, 2 outlets on E wall, some baseboard heaters in the family area.
• Dehumidifer stand and laundry corner shelving, with outlet
• Light above laundry corner, switch on shelving.
• Paint floor in concrete area
• Drop ceiling in entire downstairs

Exterior:

• Scrape and paint eaves. (How to get up to them?)
• E wall - concrete under threshold, caulk, paint door and trim, paint threshold
• Caulk and paint middle door frame (top coat)
• Install security light (box already in place)
• Mortar in foundation
• Caulk under and around window, top coat of paint
• N - fix light
• Outhouse roof trim - replace, paint
• W - tuck-point base
• Mortar, caulk, paint old carriage door frame
• 1x4" trim on S end of carriage door frame
• Trim window, paint upstairs window
• Mortar at base on SW
• S wall - mortar, caulk, paint
• Finish patching of sill of SW window
• Drive: concrete patch, paint
• Dig small drainage pipe for (new!) gutter downspout

I figure that's, what? Two or three days' work?

Seriously, though, I'm going to get as far as I can on this between June 22nd and July 1, when I'll have the place entirely to myself. Then I can put tarps down, move furniture into other rooms, and so on. I'm going to do some of the more cosmetic work during this time; bigger items probably won't get addressed at all (although the remainder of the summer is supposed to be House Time, too).

I don't even have the heart to post a similar list for the big house - but if that list were actually completed, I'd have a fully renovated carriage house on my hands, and it is doable. It truly doesn't need more than this right now - oh, sure, there are things that would be nice if I wanted to sink more money and time into them. But they're not necessary.

Back carriage house door

So towards the end of the summer (August 25), we did some yard work, and one of the things my wife volunteered for, as the only not-yet-sensitive individual in the family, was to carefully extricate some of the old poison ivy from the back door in the carriage house. The ivy itself was dead (I killed it quick upon arrival in 2009) but the dead vines still contain urushiol, and I typically break out just from leaf debris falling on my head.

Well, when the door was freed of its vines and associated leaf mold, we discovered a sad fact: the threshold and lower frame of the door had at some point been eaten by termites. The threshold was entirely gone, leaving a surprising amount of space open under the door once I removed the humus.

This was bad. This is a flashing neon sign saying, "Mice welcome here." Not to mention drafts.

Since we don't really need three doors on the east wall of the carriage house, I figured I'd frame it in and replace it with a window, like the window on the south end of the west wall. That window is pretty cool. So I went and bought a window of massive dimensions (34"x56", only something like $190 at Menard's) and ... there it sat for a while. There was so much other winterization to do, and glazing a window for my daughter's room, and a drain broke in the big house and had to be replaced, and, well, it was November before I knew it.

On November 13, I had had enough, and poured the footer for the new bit of frame wall. It took me maybe an hour. Part of the reason I took so long to get started, to be honest, is that the bottom of this footer area wasn't level, and there was a big gap at the left end of the plywood form. Pretty stupid reason. I ended up taking a bit of brick and two small marble rocks from the garden and placing them there, and just pouring the concrete over them. It worked great and looks great, so ... there's a trick you can use if you're ever in a similar situation.

Well, but I'd opened that door, and as you can see, the frame was no longer really attached to the building. I couldn't close the door again. I did the best I could and stacked some junk against the inside, and let the concrete cure for, um, well, the camera must be lying when it says I left it like that for six days. Right?

On November 19th, the paying work subsided to the point where I couldn't ignore this any further, and so I started removal of the door and frame. I wanted to keep the round wood at the top, and the top of the frame was also still solid, so I basically wanted to cut 2x8s out of the floor framing in the big house basement (long story - but the short version is, the previous owner had some odd ideas about the parts of houses that could be rendered habitable, so I have a great deal of framing lumber for these projects) and fashion a new frame in the shape of a U.

The process of cleaning the old door out yielded a great deal of rubble, and was done by about 1 in the afternoon (I had only started around noon), at which point I realized I had no drill bit for my bottom frame part, which I wanted to bolt into those anchor bolts you see here. (Doesn't that footer look pretty good? I'm feeling like maybe I know what I'm doing, a little, with concrete.)

So I left the house with a big hole in it, to the amusement of the neighbors, and went to Menard's for a drill bit and Taco Bell for lunch (and kind of regretted the latter, although the Wodehouse accompaniment was top-notch, don't you know, old top). Then came the taxi work for the afternoon, and so it was four o'clock by the time I got back to work. Did you know the sun is setting at about five these days? This was frustrating.

But by 7:30, the frame didn't look half bad! It took this long because no matter how carefully you measure a distance in a 130-year-old brick house, the wood you cut will still be wrong. Note the presence of the maul. This frame will be there for another fifty or a hundred years, easy - the middle crossbar there was about 3/16" too big. Rather than cut it again, I pounded the darn thing into place, with the added benefit that the sides of the frame will not drift on the wall. (The original builders didn't nail the sides to the wall, so I didn't either.)

I put a 2x4 at the top of the window to give me something to nail the window to - and then I realized that it was pretty handy for holding the round top of the old door up to the top of the opening. 8 PM at this point, and I had paying work to do - but I still had a gaping hole in the side of the carriage house, and the nights are getting pretty chilly.

I popped the window in, which took about ten minutes at this point (for once, something fit as measured) - here it is on the inside, showing how much plaster work is going to be necessary.

Then I cut a piece of plywood to cover up the open part on the bottom, and worked on paying work into the wee hours, and slept the sleep of the just.

On the outside on the 21st, I framed around the window with 1x2s and painted the whole thing with my oil-based white primer. And that's as far as I've gotten - I want to put an exterior outlet there (it will be the first on the whole property) before framing in and plastering over the whole thing.

But here's a picture of the outside, which save a little more caulk and the topcoat (which at this week's temperatures is looking like it will have to wait for spring) is essentially done. I get a little frisson of pride every time I see it, which is several times a day. (It does make the kitchen window above it look even more ragged in contrast, though.)

One room spiffy and clean

One room nearly done (the carriage house bedroom). First picture is the picture my sister took the day we closed; the second is the one I took just now after lots of paint was applied, the new window is trimmed and painted, and a new light fixture is in place. I guess you see the baseboard heater as well. (The door is still stripped here and needs a new knob, but it's always exciting to paint things and the room won't be this empty again any time soon.)

Remember that first window?

My first window removal, June 11, 2009. I finally trimmed and painted it, May 13, 2010.

Progress!

The bathroom window! Trim! Paint!

According to my notes and project documentation (digital cameras timestamp your pictures - who knew?), it was August 31 when I started the replacement of the bathroom window. The sill was a sodden mess of humus, obviously not having been maintained for decades - and north-facing, so never getting properly dry. Here you see the initial state immediately after removal of the remainder of the existing sashes (they had no glass in them when I bought the place - just some exterior Visqueen, sigh). I doused the whole thing in bleach and dried it with the heat gun; it smelled like wet dog.

I scraped off everything spongy, leaving a 1.5-inch-deep cavity under the inside sill which I filled with urethane foam. I painted the outside sill with a Zinsser fixative-slash-primer - I plain love everything Zinsser makes, really a better life through chemistry kind of company!

The result was something pretty sturdy for the next few years; the wood that remained was still pretty solid. Here you see that intermediate stage after about three coats of that primer. It's thin stuff that soaks into the substrate and makes a solid surface. I love it.

That's the view from the outside before any paint was applied (I don't think you've seen the north face of the carriage house yet, and that's the top of the outhouse, which is built exactly like a brick outhouse). Once this much was done, I filled in the cavities with caulk and painted the heck out of it; two coats of my oil-based exterior trim paint. The result looked like it hadn't been neglected since the Nixon Administration, so I figured it was time to pop in the window.

Then I went into hibernation.

Well, fast-forward to now. Unfortunately, I got a little out of the habit of photographing everything, and it appears I didn't take a picture of the untrimmed interior - suffice it to say it had yellow foam sticking out, and you can see what the interior trim looked like. My wife put down the imperial foot, and beautification thus became the order of the day. Fortunately, the paying work had come to an abrupt halt on April 16th, for the usual lack of any discernible reason (the translation industry acts seasonal - but scaled to a year from some other planet, perhaps one in a binary system without a stable orbit). The upshot: I had both motivation and time. It was time to trim.

Trimming was complicated by the fact that the window was actually an inch too narrow for its frame (I didn't want to spring the extra $100 for a custom size for one lousy inch). So instead of a simple quarter-round trim on the edges of the pocket window replacement, I used 1x1s left over from the roof job last summer. You can see here that the trim paint had to be stripped, too - like all the trim in the carriage house apartment, it's latex applied on top of oil. Sigh. Without primer, of course, so it just peels off. Here you see it peeled off.

After much heat-gunning, the oil coat underneath was also removed (well, mostly), and the fully-trimmed window is now ready for painting. An unfortunate lens artifact makes it look like the carriage house is a lot less square than it actually is; the window does not actually bulge like this in real life.

Here you can also see the blue plastic wall tiles of the bathroom. A much later followup job will be to take those off, scrape their glue, and paint the entire wall with a resilient bathroom-appropriate paint. They're pretty horrendous.

Zinsser 1-2-3 primer sticks to anything, including the residual oil paint left on this trim, and since I'm using an interior latex, priming is important. Priming also shows us just how many nail holes have been knocked into this window over the decades; so I caulked them all up and laid down a thin bead along all the seams of the trim as well.

The next day, the topcoat - et voilà! A lovely trimmed window just like Mama used to make. Now I only have one window (the kitchen window) to replace, and a total of four to trim and paint; I've started stripping the paint on the bedroom window this week.

This window is literally so nice it gives me a thrill to look at it, even a week later.

Plaster and mortar

The work in the carriage house "basement" is proceeding apace, and as promised, here are some pictures of my technique, first a before on the right side of the central east door:
Then the after, which is the other side of the door, which actually had a much larger chunk of plaster missing:

The way I've been doing this is to fill most of the void with mortar (you can see some new mortar in the hole in the top picture, but that was a little extra from my last batch), leaving just about an eighth of an inch of space. Then I put a "topcoat" on with patching plaster. On the corner I push it around to be vaguely square, then after it sets I go back with a knife and straighten it up. The result is not as strong as proper topcoat plaster, but it's easy to work with, and the mortar underneath is so strong on the bricks that it seems to work just fine. Ask me again in twenty years, I guess.

But I'm reasonably proud of the appearance. I don't really care how smooth the end result is, because the rest of the wall is so irregular that truly regular plaster would look odd. But it's a pretty strong corner and square enough. Once it's all painted I think this is a pretty good look, and it's already better mortar and plaster work than I was doing in the fall. Another couple of years of this and I'll be good at it!

Finally back to building!

New target: the east door on the carriage house. The ultra-frigid weather of two weeks ago is gone, but there are still some serious drafts howling through our nice new family room, so this effort is important.

For orientation, note that you can see the sunroom roof through the transom of this door, and the Japanese maple that's between the buildings. In the backyard picture from July, this door is to the far left of the picture, and it is directly under window #2.

The cord hanging down is my quick-and-dirty wiring for the security light outside; part of this project will be to wire that properly and insulate the arched space above the transom.

As always, the first order of business is to fix plaster. First, I removed the inner board of the arched space (look at those arched bricks - aren't they neat?) to see what fell off. The large chunk of plaster at the right above that arch did so, and so I took my caulk/adhesive and glued it back in place. I caulked the right side of the door (light showing), then I mortared the missing plaster there, right on top of the caulk. The left side of the door is in better condition, for whatever reason.

This is getting to be my pattern for this plaster. I'm using mortar as a base layer, then patching plaster as the top layer. I'm sure the patching plaster isn't as strong as a true plaster top coat, but this is working OK for smaller areas like this. And you can't beat mortar for strength, assuming you mix it right. (Ahem.)

Anyway, that was yesterday's work. Today, I put a deadbolt on this door. The old lock was missing, so there was a 1-1/2" hole in it. This is not what we in the building trades consider winterized. So now it's better.

Friday, my HVAC friend is coming, and we'll have heat in the big house for the first time. (Ahem again.) Then we can get back to plumbing over there. So more on that in the days to come.

The Floor: done!

OK, so the latest in the southwest corner saga has been the decision to put in a raised floor covering the southern half of the downstairs in the carriage house. Once we started painting those walls, the prospect of a family room kind of area there just sort of leaped out at us.

That effort is complete.

The first step was to frame in the section of floor we wanted to use. The layout of the upstairs of the carriage house actually shows this pretty well; the new family room area is the square on the south end of the downstairs, with the stairway to the east of it. That turned out to be an area just shy of 16'x16'.

Since we were using 2x4s taken from the big house's basement, they smelled rather moldy. So as you can see, we decided to paint them with a Zinser sealing primer after dousing them with bleach. After the bleach, they actually no longer smelled moldy, but man, some of them had branching mold structures etched on their sides, so we just didn't want to play around with them. Plus the kids did the painting, so it was no extra work for me.
This framing work took about a week.

Once the framing was done, it was time to start laying the plywood, a 3/4" moisture-treated subfloor. This stuff was heavy; I could lift a sheet, but since all sawing had to be done in the big house (to minimize sawdust propagation), it all added up to a lot of physical labor. As you can see, we also laid down Styrofoam insulation board under the floor. It's about R8, so I don't know whether it's going to have a huge impact, but the completed floor is indeed comfy.

As I went, I tried to insert shims under the 2x4 frame to make sure it was solid on the concrete. I found that attaching the plywood warped the frame somewhat, but the final floor is still pretty solid and has no places that bang when you step on them, so I call it a success.

Here's an extremely important trick I learned from disassembly of the floor in the big house's basement - as you lay the plywood, take a 4' straightedge and draw a line over the joist. Now, you know where to put your screws. I forgot this on one sheet of plywood (until it was too late; I'd already put down the next row) and kicked myself repeatedly as I sank screw after screw into empty space.

Finally, though, yesterday, eight pieces of plywood later, it was done. I don't know if you can see this, but the plywood is cut to fit into the irregularity in the south wall (also the west wall) where the doors used to be. I'm pretty proud of this floor, actually. It's kind of silly - but this is really the largest carpentry project I've done. I actually ran through a box of screws for the first time in my life.

Anyway, today's project was to get the carpet down. What you say? Carpet? Yeah, even with the dust allergies, we decided that a thin, easily cleaned carpet with no pad was still a better choice for the floor than a cold linoleum - and we can't really afford a wooden surface here. I'd love a laminate or plank floor, but it's just a temporary house for the winter, not the main show. This picture, by the way, shows the carpet cut in under the west window (remember that first picture of that window with the Truck 'o' Stuff piled next to it?)

So here's nearly the final result for the southwest corner. I still want to put a bit of drywall over that exposed brick section, and the little window needs sealing and insulation, and there still needs to be some caulking done here, and painting of the trim and repainting of the dings and scrapes from putting in the plywood. And the trim's not finished yet, and actually I still have about six feet of tacking on the east wall, but:

The tree is up in time for St. Nicholas Day. And the shoes are in the window. Happy Holidays.

Southwest corner update

Well, it's not done yet, but progress is definitely being made. I'm pretty happy with how this is coming out.

I've been looking into plaster lately. It's not all that easy to find plaster, for sale I mean. But I want to learn how to do it right. There is a store for plaster-specific supplies about an hour and a half from here. I'm thinking of visiting soon. For instance, there's a nifty material called "plaster bond" that you can put into cracks before refinishing. The carriage house has lots of cracked plaster (the big house, not so much, for some reason). I'm eager to give this stuff a try.

Drywall!

Back on October 5 when I started the southwest corner, the initial picture showed that the south wall fill-in where the garage door used to be had no drywall. (That's where the ants were on October 13.)

Two days ago, I finished that. It's not sanded or painted yet, but it's not fiberglass hanging out, either. After cleaning out the ants, I replaced the insulation, and then it was time to start.

The first sheet took way too long. I'd measured the height of the sheet at the front of the frame on top of the opening, but nothing in this opening is even close to square. So I ended up cutting off another half inch or so, a little bit at a time. Ugh. But finally it was in place.

This is the first time I've used full sheets of this mold-resistant cementitious wallboard. It's heavy, way heavier than conventional drywall. Still much lighter than a wall made of bricks, of course. In comparison with the rest of the building, this wall feels distinctly flimsy.

For the second sheet, I measured the height of the first sheet, determined not to make the same mistake. So naturally, this sheet was an inch too short on the left side. Oy. It didn't even come up to the 2x4 frame-in. The answer: lots of spackle, oh well.

The wall as she looks today - I spackled in around all the edges, and the result is pretty darned nice. My next trick is to sand all the spackle and paint it, along with the frame of the old garage door.

I'm using "Ultra White" latex paint for these walls. I like white, a lot - and I have to say, I'm really liking how it looks in this basement area.

Concrete is our friend

The floor of that southwest corner was pretty grotty - but when I really got in there with the Shopvac and sucked out all the loose dirt and brick dust and humus, it turned out to be a honking huge hole about four inches deep. The original plan was to patch it up with patching cement, but that stuff just isn't made for large volumes, and besides I just had a 10-pound bag, which would probably just disappear into that hole and never be seen again.

Bigger guns were necessary, in this case (gulp) actual concrete, which I had never actually used before.

So today my daughter and I learned how to work with concrete - turns out it's just like mortar except with gravel instead of sand, and probably some other differences. The important thing is, just like mortar, if you mix it with enough water and you're patient, it is a very forgiving medium. Here's the corner after we lugged in an 80-pound back of Quikrete from the car (good God 80 pounds is heavy) and mixed it up a bucket at a time, troweling it into place with our mortar trowels (which worked fine).

Then, what the heck, we kept right on going along the west wall, which had a lot of weirdness in it, including the bottom of the white window featured last week or so, pictured here. I had been wondering how best to seal up the base of that door fill-in; as always, masonry is totally our friend.

Well, flush with that success - remember back on July 26, when I finished the washer/dryer hookup and right at the end of the post I mentioned there was a truly big hole right in that corner where somebody once obviously fixed the drain stack but found refilling the hole just too much trouble?

Well, they were right. It was a job of work, let me tell you. First, we wheelbarrowed in six loads of dirt; two left over from the drainage ditch, and four from next to the cold frame where there's kind of a little hill built up.

It was a weird feeling, bringing load after load of dirt into the house, with a wheelbarrow, and it felt like a crime to use this lovely dirt to fill in a hole in the basement, but we got lots of this dirt out there, so there you go.

The next step was pea gravel, for a nice solid base after tamping down the dirt with a short length of 2x4 for a while. This part was much easier; no wheelbarrow was harmed in the taking of this picture.

Then it was on to the concrete itself. We finished off the first bag, then carried the other in from the car (I carried, she made sure the dog didn't get out).

We still ran out of concrete before we ran out of hole; this is the second bag of concrete. Turned out to be a bigger hole than I thought.

So we went out for Mexican (I had the burrito/taco/rice/beans combo, which was on special and quite good), and bought three more bags of concrete, each of which I now feel in every muscle of my body, and it took another bag and a half!

But the lovely result is what will soon be a solid floor for the washer and dryer: