Plastering the other two walls
Last weekend I did a second coat of plaster on two of the walls in the room but had to pause due to some family commitments. This weekend I resume plastering and apply a second coat to the two walls I missed last weekend. The exterior facing wall didn’t have too many repairs so that goes pretty quickly to apply the second coat.
Moving the gas line out a little to get plaster behind the pipe.
All walls with 2 coats of plaster.
The other wall had a bunch of repairs so that needs a bit more attention to level things out and get all the bulges from the washers covered up. After I get the walls done, I do a final pass on the ceiling with the extra fine plaster. The ceiling was done a few weeks ago and is about 90% there, but there were a few spots that annoyed me with some rough patches. I put on very little plaster and dilute it with water so it’s mostly just filling in any nicks and gashes that I missed during the last application. Since I’m not wallpapering the ceiling I want to try and make it as smooth as possible.
With the plaster done, I take a break and hit a yard sale in the Crest in an older home. The house was built in 1908 and recently sold. The owners said the buyers promised not to tear down the home and I am interested in seeing the house to compare with mine due to the same era of construction. I notice very similar finishes in the house such as wooden doorknobs, beadboard and molding that matches my home’s interior.
Wood doorknobs.
Shellacked beadboard.
Back at my house it’s more stripping of woodwork. I have about 90% of the wood done, but there’s still some small spots of paint and overall a bit of a white haze on the wood. I try washing down with TSP and it does remove some of the haze, but it’s a lot of scrubbing. So I go back to applying stripper on the wood to let the chemicals do some of the work. I scrub stripper and then apply afterwash and scrub some more. I get about half of the baseboards done before running out of time.
Final strip and afterwash.
Scrubbing and stripping.
A couple final things to finish up is measuring the room for wallpaper and making sure the selected design works with the room. I’m going with a dark blue starfield from Bradbury. Also while working on plastering and scrubbing I pop downstairs to keep applying coats of shellac to the two doors. I think I’ve built up enough shellac on the doors so they will cure for a week and then I’ll rub them out with mineral spirits and steel wool to level out the finish before applying paste wax.
Wallpaper sample.
Shellacked door.
