Finishing touches

With all of the renovation done, this weekend is spent decorating the cottage bedroom. I already have a set of decorations from before the renovation, but will revisit how they are placed. Before I renovated the room, I hung some of the pictures to hide plaster cracks and holes, but now that’s all repaired, I can hang things for aesthetic reasons. Also, now that I have crown molding, I can use that as a picture rail and not drill anything into the plaster walls. All of the picture hanging stuff you buy at Home Depot assumes you will be hammering or screwing into sheetrock, but with plaster, hanging stuff is a bit more tricky. You can’t use any of the picture hangers that rely on nails because nailing into plaster is a bad move. First, the plaster can crack since you’re hammering into a rock and not into soft gypsum covered in paper. The other issue is that you can loosen the plaster keys that are holding it to the wall by hamming into it. This would be a bigger problem where the plaster could fall off from the wall. If you do hang, you need to use a screw, but even that will put holes in my newly finished work so I instead go for hanging from the crown molding.

Hanging from the crown molding and from an old gas line.

In the Victorian era when plaster was the only type of wall coating, there was a strip of molding at the top of the wall called a picture rail. Then you could place hooks on the rail and have cord down the wall to hang pictures. I don’t understand how they nailed the picture rail in since that would seem to crack and detach the plaster, but I guess once you have the picture rail you’re good to go.

I don’t have a true picture rail, but have a strip of molding I can put hooks into to suspend pictures. Karen is down to help lay out the pictures and we use some nice cord from House of Antiques to hang the pictures. For the particle board and sheetrock portions of the room I use tacks to hold in some pennants and old advertisements.

The last piece is hanging the curtains, but will have to wait till next week since they are still on the way from my Etsy purchase. I shift to cleaning the rest of the cottage and turning back on the water. As soon as I turn on the hot water, I hear the sound of spraying water under the cottage’s crawlspace. Right near the outside spigot, I see water blowing out from an elbow joint. Damnit, I thought that I blew all the water out of the system when I shut things down for the winter. I call a plumber to take a look and now need to that pipe fixed. That stops the full enabling of the cottage for Summer, so I move to a non-cottage task.

During last Fall I removed the vinyl under the main house’s side stoop and replaced with lattice. The next weekend I returned, there was a big hole chewed out of the lattice. My suspicion that it was an opossum was confirmed when I met with an exterminator last weekend when he showed the white hairs around the chewed wood. During the week they set a trap, but no luck catching it, so this weekend I back the lattice panels with chicken wire to keep critters out from under the house. I see a lot of feral cats around so I think that after the opossum chewed the hole, the cats were then using it to get access to the crawlspace. I’m hoping the chicken wire will finally even the score and keep things out from under the house.

I think most of the damage came from the inside which means that I must have trapped the animal under the house when I installed the lattice and it was desperate to escape.