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?

Long live the camera

Meijer had a great clearance on $40 GE cameras. I love the technology curve - I spent $100 on my last clearance camera and it was nowhere near as good as this one.

Anyway, the plaster patches on the back stairs are dry now - well, they were effectively dry even as I was putting them on the wall - and you can see how rough they are. A lot better than the holes they replaced, granted, but a disappointment.

The new camera can only hold ten pictures at a time (I haven't bought memory yet) so I needed to get this out of it to take pictures of today's plaster triumph. I started patching the front room in the carriage house. Here's what it looked like after removal of the previous owner's drywall mud. Click for the bigger picture, of course.

The upshot is: you can't really effectively patch cracks in plaster and brick with tape and drywall mud, so the patches are cracking, roughly three years after they were applied. I'm stripping off the worst of them and patching properly with plaster.

To mix the plaster, I started with a clean container: a Teflon-coated breadpan that had already been repurposed for geode cleaning. No stick = no crystal formation. I also added a splash of vinegar to the mix. The upshot was that it took a good half-hour for the plaster to start hardening in the pan, which was enough time to actually, you know, use it. I also cleaned my painter's knife and plaster trowel thoroughly before starting (and again after finishing).

And it worked! I've been scared of plaster's reputation as being a lost art mastered only in historical times by towering giants of the construction industry. It may very well take years to get good at it - but it took me two tries to get acceptably OK. I think some more tries will make me confident.

Pictures later. I'm going to go take them now.

How not to apply top coat plaster

Well, the camera is officially dead, so no pictures until I get a new one, but I took my first stab at applying top coat plaster to some of the patchy areas on the back stairs, and I have some recommendations about how not to proceed.

First: I'm using plaster of Paris. Here's the thing - if there's prehardened plaster (i.e. something with crystals already in it) in your bucket? The crystals will catalyze the new plaster into hardening really, really fast. So I mixed up just a little - and it was too hard to apply within five minutes, I kid you not. And that doesn't leave much time for smoothing. Of course, on that wall, any amount of smoothing is an improvement, and nobody says I can't take several stabs at these patchy bits, either.

After seeing how well that didn't work (well, it was exciting to try my new big steel trowel, and it was my first top coat attempt, and that was fun) I went back to the Google drawing board. The chaps over at diyplastering.co.uk have some nice information about plastering, and bucked up my courage in thinking maybe this is something I can manage. And the guy at brooklynrowhouse.com swears by his Magic Trowel, so maybe I'll try that - but he also adds a little vinegar to his plaster of Paris to keep it softer longer. That's a good idea.

But one thing everybody says - keep your bucket and tools as clean as humanly possible. I didn't. For mortar or basecoat it just doesn't matter - but plaster of Paris cares.

More later, after I have time to experiment some more. I'm going to need the practice, because after I started peeling the paint off the walls in the upstairs sunroom, huge patches of the top coat came off, too. So I have most of a wall to do in there. And of course there's lots of top coat repair in the dining room, too, and I'll be seeing any flaws there for years.

Plaster!

So now that I'm in the big house, I walk back and forth a lot between the front of the big house, down the back stairs and out the back door, into the carriage house and up those stairs to the apartment, which is still where the bathroom, kitchen, and remainder of the family is located. Not to mention, downstairs in the carriage house, the family room and my shop (actually just tool and materials storage, as I don't have a proper workbench).

I go through this door a lot, which is between the mudroom and the back stairs. It was originally the back door to the one-story back addition, probably originally the kitchen, and the "mudroom" is basically just a later back porch that has been enclosed - one wall still has the siding of the earlier back room, and the other wall is the brick of the earlier earlier back room. (This house tended to accrete back into further and further back rooms.)

Now, the problem with this door is that the frame had somehow managed to move to the east (that is, into the house) by about 3/4". The problem had obviously been of very long standing, because it had been caulked and some plaster added, clearly in an attempt at winterization. So naturally I popped the trim off, nailed a couple of 2x4 bits to it, and took the maul to it - which worked wonderfully! In about five minutes, I had it back where it was supposed to be!

Unfortunately, all the plaster around the door frame kind of fell off; the old box gutters were attached to the eyebrow that had a squirrel living in it last year (scroll down), and so there was obviously a great deal of leakage through the wall.

So I took the opportunity to go to Menard's and make an exciting new purchase: a bag of base coat plaster!

Anybody who's been reading this blog for any length of time (a year already!) knows that I favor solid construction and masonry. The only problem is that I've never done any of it, so I'm learning as I go. This was therefore a gulpingly novel step. My first real plaster job.

Incidentally, the old basecoat plaster on this wall probably dates to about 1890 (the date I believe this back room was added, along with the dining room bay), and yes, it is mixed with what appears to be human hair for strength. Which I'd read about, and is only marginally creepy.

Lesson #1 about plaster: you need a lot of it. A base coat about half an inch thick over a couple of square feet of wall is a lot more plaster than my usual half-hour tuck pointing quantity of mortar. So this first bag of base coat is going to go fast.

But the first part of the base coat turned out extremely satisfactory in terms of solidity. Here's a picture. I'll update you when I try the top coat - right now I'm knocking out all the crappy bits of plaster on the back stairs and putting a base coat into those (rather extensive) gaps.

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.

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.

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.

Beautification target: carriage house "basement" southwest corner

So here is really the first wall we're looking at fixing. This is all kind of bound up with the ongoing winterization and caulking effort; since the outside of the wall needs tuck pointing, the cracks you see to the right of the little boarded-up window are actually letting air in. Yikes! But much more importantly, there was a 1/8" slat nailed to the right side of that boarded-up window, and behind the slat was a really honking big crack from the wall settling.
Here's the crack in its native condition, and forgive my repeated use of Irwinism, but crikey, he's a big one.

Big enough, in fact, that my first step was just to cut up a bunch of leftover Styrofoam (from the box from the overhead light, actually) and jam them in.
That basically fills the crack, so it's a good start. There's a lot of extra air space between the brick layers in there (I believe they've moved a little), but there's not much we can do about that, beyond urethane foam to fill in some of it.

I'll post more on this endeavor later.