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| Sexy, huh? |
What started as a conversation about repainting the bedrooms turned into a conversation about renovating the entire house, inside and out.
The house was built in 1920 and had some work done in the 1980s. Some of the work we're doing is to restore the original woodwork and character. The rest of the work is undoing the work done in the 1980s. At least they put in central heat/air!
Aaron started doing some exploratory work in the dining room to figure out how difficult it would be to patch the plaster walls. That turned into scraping the popcorn ceiling, which turned into peeling the lovely wallpaper we discovered under 87 layers of paint. At that point, we decided to conquer the dining room and living room.
Removing the popcorn from the ceiling wasn't too bad. Messy, but fairly easy. Lucky for us, there was sheetrock and not badly damaged plaster underneath.
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| Bye, bye tacky popcorn |
The wallpaper was also easy to remove. Instead of buying fancy paste remover, we used soapy water. (Thank you, Time LIfe books.)
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| Very messy |
Some of the original woodwork was destroyed by previous occupants, who cut it to install blinds or curtains. Much of has survived but was suffering from several layers of poor paint jobs. So we got out our putty knives and started scraping.
Or so we thought... We tried using the heat gun but we risked filling the house with lead fumes. We tried a citrus stripper but it smelled funny and made the paint gummy. Then we tried washing soda but that didn't work everywhere. Finally, we discovered Ready Strip. It's biodegradable, low VOC, and actually works. It's slow going but we're nearly done with the living room.
Some of the walls were too badly damaged and had to be stripped down to the lathe. We'll patch it using drywall.
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| Dining room |
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| Living Room |
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