Running late.

Happy belated Fourth of July, everyone! Hope it was a good one.

We’ve been M.I.A. because we’ve been in kind of a funk. The work we’re doing around the house right now is boring and tedious. For example, we spent 2 entire days mudding — that’s not even worth photographing after the first round. Not that I didn’t try. I snapped hundreds of photos of Bradley putting a second (and sometimes third) coat of plaster in the Smurf room and hallways. But when I reviewed the photos later, they put me in a coma. That’s how boring plastering is.

Here’s the most exciting sequence of the entire weekend: Bradley cracked open a fresh bucket-o-plaster and thought it seemed a bit dry, so he added a splash of water.

Then he gave it a whirl with his paint mixer drill attachment.

He blended until it was smooth and ready to smear on the walls.

Funny aside. Bradley’s first job in NYC was as a building maintenance guy for a very shi-shi-poo-poo restaurant in Chelsea. He pretty much did what he’s doing in our house right now: fixed things in a very, very old building. Anyway, the chefs used these same paint mixer drill attachments to mix giant batches of soup. Bradley thought it was hilarious to walk into the kitchen and see a chef mixing a vat of  lobster bisque with a drill.

Aside from plastering, we also put up the rest of the ceiling in the hallway:

More plastering to follow. (Insert huge groan-sigh here.)

While the plaster dried, we insulated the hallway. Our plan was to simply attach furring strips to the plaster wall, add 2 layers of styrofoam insulation and then throw drywall up right on top of that. Bradley started by drilling some pilot holes with his concrete drill:

Then he attached a furring strip along the bottom of the wall:

Once that was secure, he put up a vertical furring strip along the edge of the wall and made sure it was level:

And that’s when our entire plan fell apart. It turns out our 130-year-old walls aren’t exactly level anymore — they’re actually curved. To make a level wall, Bradley had to do some creative shimming. Here’s what the finished framing looked like:

The wall starts out straight, then starts curving. By the time it gets to the floor, it’s up to 2 inches off from where it started!

This explains the massive gaps where floor meets wall. Remember those?

The whole process shimming process, start to finish, took a few hours. Once the wall was framed, we put up a layer of styrofoam insulation in between the furring strips:

A second layer went right on top of the first:

We have a few more pieces of insulation to cut before it’s drywall time, but the wall is shaping up. It’s nice to not look up and see a crusty, textured ceiling:

What we learned on our long weekend:

• Plastering blows.
  It’s one of those jobs that you have to do so you can move on to the more exciting stuff like priming and painting. But that doesn’t make it suck any less.
• Deadlines are maddening.
  We’d originally planned a big Fourth of July BBQ weekend with four of our favorite New Yorkers. We thought we’d easily be done with the Smurf room and guest bedroom. And then we started changing things and tweaking things and finding brick walls that needed uncovering. We’re way, way behind schedule and it’s driving us nuts. So instead of fretting over it, we’re throwing out our schedule. It’ll get done when it gets done.

The DIY shuffle: 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

We’ve been so focused on getting the Smurf room and guest bedroom finished that we’ve completely neglected the hallway that connects them.

It’s all sheetrocked and ready to be mudded on the left side. But the right side needs some love. It’s plaster on brick (no lathe), so there’s no insulation there. While Bradley was busy sheetrocking the Smurf room, I decided to remove all of the window trim and the floor board to prep the hallway for insulation. I also had to remove the trim around the doorway leading that leads into this hall so we could sheetrock that wall.

It was a pretty simple task. Or so I thought.

Hoo boy. Where to begin?

I started with the floor board because it was easy (famous last words), and used a crow bar to pry the board from the wall. Unfortunately for me, I quickly learned that the wood was permanently glued to the plaster. I’m not sure if the wood was attached to the plaster while the plaster was still wet. Or maybe the lead paint that covered both the wall and the board had formed some kind of super bond. Or maybe it was pixie magic that held the two together. Either way, when I pried the floor board loose, 8 inches of the wall pried loose with it.

I think the technical term for this is “a hot mess.”

At least the window trim and sill came off OK:

Too bad I can’t say the same for the door frame I had to remove at the end of the hallway:

Half of the plaster surrounding the doorway fell off in big chucks as I removed the trim. It looks like a bomb went off in the hallway, even after the cleanup.

Our plan was simply to put up some furring strips, insulate with 2 sheets of 1″ foam, and then sheetrock right over everything. The wall was perfectly level, so it would have worked out really well. Now we have to shim the wall to make sure we’re putting our sheetrock up straight. And we have to build it out a little to compensate for the missing plaster. We also have to make sure to build out enough to cover the giant gap between the floor and the wall:

There’s as much as a 3 inch gap at some parts. Ugh. By our calculations, with the stud we’re going to attach to the floor, plus the furring strips, insulation and sheetrock, we’ll be able to completely cover it. No promises, though — we’ve learned our lesson!

What we learned with our little hallway incident:

• Lathe walls are a pain in the @*%.
• Our house, like many other super-old houses, has settled a little. We prefer to think of it as our house having a Gangsta Lean.
• If all the plaster in our house came off this easily, we’d probably expose a lot more brick.
• Don’t ever start a project by saying, “This is easy. We’ll finish it off in one day.” It only leads to broken hearts and shattered plaster.