Memorial Weekend – AKA the hell weekend working on the house

Some people like to have a holiday when they get days off work. Not so in this household. We took the extra day as a sign to start an extra nasty project – stripping the popcorn ceiling in the dining room.

Of course, it makes sense to purchase all the necessary supplies for the above project BEFORE the day you want to start. Don’t leave it ‘til late Saturday morning to head on down to Lowes like we did.

The longest part was getting all the plastic hung. You have to cover the walls, windows and floor with contractor grade plastic to ensure none of the mess escapes. Another tip: make sure you buy CLEAR plastic to hang over the walls and windows. Black plastic is not a good idea if you want to see what you’re doing.



Once we got the plastic hung, it was time to kit up in our Ghostbuster’s gear and have at it. Let’s just say we now know how they faked the moon landing footage – it was in a room being prepared for popcorn ceiling removal.




You can never be too careful…..

After scraping, its time to throw a quick coat of latex on the old plaster.





We finished about 9:30 on Saturday night. Pretty much dead on our feet, but managed to scare the neighbors by dragging out the plastic sheet and throwing it in the back of the truck. We probably should have taken the respirators off before going outside….

Here’s the ceiling the next morning.





It’s in pretty bad shape – but nothing a few sheets of drywall won’t fix.

Next on the list was removing the remainder of the drywall. The gave us an ides of the colors used in when the house was first built.








All the external walls have suffered from insect activity between the drywall and the wainscoting/lath and plaster.



Most of the insect damage is pretty minor, but the 2*4 framing underneath was cardboard in a few places. Due to this, we decided to remove the wainscoting (after first numbering each piece) and lath/plaster.





Nice of AK to get my good side. Still, turnabout is fair play…..



This wainscoting is from the bay window. Here we found “Ghost marks” from a window seat, and a little builder graffiti.






I wonder who “Griffith & Co” was. Something else to research.

At this point, the dining room looks pretty much like this:




Next on the dining room list is:
Run new electrical:
The Dining room, Living room and half the kitchen are all on the same circuit. We’ll split each room on to two circuits each – outlets and lights. The dining room previously had one outlet in it. It’ll get four duplex outlets – with the bottom half of three of them wired into the lighting circuit. That way we’ll have a ceiling fixture and a floor lamp (we can’t decide which corner to put it in – which is why we wired three of them) controlled from the light switch.

Run structured wiring:
Each room in the house will get Cat 6, RG 6 (co-ax) and telephone. Why? Because we can.

Add insulation:
Again, we’ll take advantage of the open walls and add batt insulation. Eventually we’re going to install Central AC and heat – so we might as well try and add some efficiency.