Patching Up Plumbing Holes

I was looking toward getting the flooring going but with the plumbing re-routed, I decided to be patient and make sure to close up the demo from the plumbing work before starting on the floor. Also, the built-in still needs a lot more stripping before it’s ready for finish. It seems like a bad move to be scraping off paint and plastering in the built-in with the brand new floors down.

The plumbing changes ended up removing some plaster. I could just leave things as-is since this area will be covered in beadboard, but for the integrity of the house I want to close this back up.

Here’s the situation of the wall after rerouting the plumbing.

Now that I have some rare access to the studs I decide to also stuff the cavities with some insulation. Normally I’m not doing anything with insulation in the house, but sitting next to the open wall cavity, I feel a good draft coming in from the floor and gaps between the walls and floor. With plumbing, I figure this would be a good opportunity to insulate around the pipes just in case things get too cold during the winter. I decide to go with Rockwool for the insulation since it seems a little easier to work with than fiberglass. I wanted to go with recyled denim but I can’t find that for sale in any of the big box stores and I don’t want to wait around for special order. I stuff some of the Rockwool in the cavities and then move on to closing them up.

Adding the insulation.

To close up the holes, I’m going to go with a mix of lath plaster and sheetrock. Normally sheetrock is not in my toolkit for the house, but in this case I’m OK with it. The first thing is that the sheet rock is covering the pipes. There’s always a chance that in the future there will need to be access to the pipes for some reason. If so, it will be easier to remove the sheetrock panels than busting out the lath and plaster. As mentioned, this area will be covered by beadboard so it’s not like the sheetrock will be visible. And lastly, the shape is irregular due to the pipes so it’s easier for me to cut some sheetrock out instead of figuring out how to plaster around pipes.

Sheetrock?!

I screw the sheetrock in around the pipes and then go with lath for the other side of the repair where there is no piping. Once the lath is up, I then go with a coat of basecoat plaster with some horsehair. I will leave this rough since there will be no additional coats.

Plaster repairs.

After the plaster repairs are done, I apply another coat of Durabond near the medicine cabinet to smooth that out before wallpaper. It feels really tough to build up the area to be flat; I don’t think any more coats will work so next week I’ll do another another extra fine plaster skim coat.

For the rest of the work it’s just scraping and scrubbing the built-in. This is tedious work of removing the latex paint on the plaster back wall and the remaining paint on the wood. It’s a tight space so it’s hard to access all of the areas. The built-in is in pretty rough shape so I’m thinking that I’ll definitely need to use a darker stain on this to hide some of the blemishes. The doors I just used BLO and they look nice, but I think a darker covering will be needed so I’m leaning towards adding some brown linseed oil paint to BLO as a stain.

Stripping the built-in. Almost done.