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.

Ants!

So there I was, just now, cleaning up the south wall of the carriage house in preparation for drywalling it, and there was a lot of crumbly dirt at the base of the wall. I pulled out the fiberglass and - have you ever seen an anthill in your house? No? Me neither, until today.

Nope, they're not carpenter ants, just bog-standard large-issue black ants whose anthill happens to be in a place that stays miraculously warm through the winter. I feel almost apologetic kicking them out.

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 II: before and after

Just to the right of the picture I took last week of the southwest corner, there is a window on the west wall. Here is the picture I took in May, just after the arrival of the Truck 'o' Stuff, showing its ur-state.

Here is what that window looks like today. Actually, in person it looks slightly better; those grayish flecks on it are caulk, which must have a slightly different infrared reflectivity than the paint, because the flecks are utterly invisible to the human eye.

At any rate, I'm pretty proud of this, as it's really been teaching me a lot about masonry. At the corners of this window, there was serious plaster damage; here's an intermediate picture after some paint was already applied (I wish I'd taken better starting pictures) showing the hole. Further down is some urethane foam, my initial stopping of the myriad holes this window contained.

Now, on the south wall of this area, there's a large patch where missing plaster had been replaced by mortar. I was impressed, never having considered mortar in this application. But it works! It's ugly, but rock-hard.

So I mixed up some mortar and stuffed the holes, then the next day I cleaned out the mortar and did it again, because had I screwed up the first batch; it had become friable and sandy and could be flicked out by hand. I hadn't put enough water into the mixture, so on my second trial I was very careful: I mixed a much goopier starting mixture, carefully sprayed water onto the brick in the hole, then applied the mortar. To be extra-careful, I sprayed water onto the mortar again that evening - the longer mortar takes to dry, the better it cures (the crystallization process stops when the mortar dries, you see).

The result was incredibly solid, and adhered very well to the edges of the hole. I also applied mortar at the top of the old door frame (this window was set into a door frame), where there was about a 1/2" crack. I'd long since squirted urethane into the back of that crack to seal it, but it was still ugly.

Once I was satisfied that my second batch of mortar was going to set properly, I used plaster patch to smooth it out somewhat. It would have been a waste of time to make it too smooth, as the rest of this wall is anything but - so I just slapped some plaster onto it and painted it.

Once you gain a little physical skill working with mortar and masonry, I have to say, it is a very forgiving medium. I'm really starting to like it a lot.

Fixing the bathtub wall II

This came out a little blurry, but here's the second layer of patch in place, and the faucet handles so I could take my morning shower.

The thickness worked out fine at the corner with the other wall, but the patch is at least an 1/8" too thick at the other side. Plaster, since it's hand-applied instead of factory-made, can vary in thickness unless the plasterer is very careful about even thickness; I can only assume that's what happened here.

Since the whole thing is getting covered with a tub surround, I don't think it's going to be too important. My tub surround might be a little lumpy, but it probably won't be very noticeable. Another thing to note, ex post facto: mark the location of studs before putting your wallboard in place, and you will curse less and waste fewer screws.

Also, turns out my rock-solid faucet, while still rock-solid, is not as straight as I had thought. I should have been more careful when fastening the straps. The cold water tap projects from the wall about a quarter-inch more than the hot. That's invisible when there's no wall, but now it's clear. Sigh.

Well, if that's the worst screwup I make in this renovation, I'm probably going to be pretty happy. At least it all works, and doesn't leak.

Fixing the bathtub wall

So as you may recall, after tearing out the bathtub faucet and clearing out the soft plaster, I ended up with a wall looking like this. The lower open part is where the wall had been patched once before; the upper part is the original wall which has sustained more damage after that.

The structure of these interior walls is interesting; they're plaster on sheetrock, which is how plaster walls are done today. I don't know when it was phased in, but given my razor blade archaeology, I'm saying immediately post-WWII. Anyway, what we have is about 1/2" of plaster on about 3/8" of sheetrock.

The patch done earlier hasn't survived even a bit. It was 3/4" drywall on a thin piece of wooden paneling added as a shim to get to the total thickness of the original wall, but the drywall didn't survive the removal of the tub surround. Plaster survives everything except leaching by water. The parts that weren't soft were, well, rock-hard. Excellent craftsmanship.

Now, of course, instead of drywall, we use a cementitious backer board. Lowe's had convenient half-sheets (fit in the van) in 1/4" and 1/2" thicknesses. I thought I'd have to shim out another 1/8", but as we'll see, that 3/4" total thickness seems just about right already.

Our first step is to square off the hole. This was somewhat tedious, but fun, as it involved hammering bits of wall out with a screwdriver. (It was tedious because it had to be done accurately.) It took maybe 45 minutes, and the newly rectlinear hole already looks more presentable, doesn't it?

Next, we cut a piece of 1/4" backer board, painstakingly make the right holes for the faucet, and screw it in place with just a couple of screws. After all, we're going to be putting more screws in for the second layer.

Note that I've left a little open strip there. Since this backer board doesn't actually have to support anything (like plaster or tiles) we can get away with that; it's just there for thickness. Same with the hole a foot higher between the two strips of sheetrock. If we were plastering this wall, we'd have to do something about that, but in this case, we don't.

Cutting those holes in the right place was very difficult until I realized that just using a knife was not the way to go. After I used the drill to drill lots of little holes around the rim of each larger hole, it went pretty well.

Now here's the weird thing. I set it in place just to eyeball it before putting in my shims - and it's already thick enough. So much for measurement - go figure.

The next step is to do this again, with the 1/2" board over the larger portion. I'll update this post if I do it tonight; otherwise it will be a new post on the morrow.