Finally, some more progress

Sorry to go so long between posts. I've been pretty busy on the house this past week, and the week before I hardly got anything done. It was just one of those weeks where you cant get anything done no matter how hard you try.

One of the projects I finally got around to doing is tearing down the wall between the Foyer and the Study. Some of you may remember in one of my early posts that this wall had been moved and was not in it's original position. It's also crooked as hell and covered part of the front door frame.

The wall came down really easy, I took the framing apart very carefully so I can reuse it for the new wall.


In the picture below you can see where they built the wall right over the front door frame:

When I rebuild the wall the front Foyer will be a little over a foot wider. I'm also going to frame the doorway in the center of the wall for double french doors, just like the parlor entrance on the other side of the foyer. The french doors are from an early 1900's farmhouse.

I also hung the chandelier we got off Craigslist in the Study:


I've finally started on patching the ceilings upstairs. It's something I haven't been looking forward to, they need a lot of work.


This picture will give you an idea of the condition of our upstairs ceilings. We want to save as much plaster as possible so we've decided to patch the ceilings instead of replacing them. We used 1/4" drywall for a few reasons, one being weight, it's a lot ligher than 1/2". Another reason is because some of the plaster on the ceiling is pretty thin, I didnt want to have to build all those areas up.

The first two pics below are in the nursery. First we squared the area to be patched:

We then screwed up the drywall and skimmed the entire patch with mud mixed with sand:


The sand gives the mud a gritty texture that is similar to plaster. These pictures were before the second skim coat. I still have to sand it down, patch and sand all the cracks, and sand down the stipling on the rest of the ceiling in all the rooms, I'm NOT looking forward to that. If the patch stands out really bad once it's all been sanded down I'm going to have to skim the entire ceiling in every room, that's something I just dont have time for.

Heres the other big patch in the nursery:

Here's the patch in the master bedroom:



Next is the upstairs hallway ceiling at the top of the stairs, the original design was terrible. The location was an addition built in the early 1900's. The ceiling was very low and was really crooked.


The above picture was taken when the attic stairs were being installed. A few months back I tore the ceiling out.


I finally got around to it again the other day. What I decided on was a sloped ceiling. Here's a shot of the framing:

Insulation:

Some of the drywall up:



This is as far as I got last night. I'm hoping to finish the drywall tonight. We're once again racing against the clock. We need to get the flooring guys up here this week so they can finish by the end of next week. Heather's helping with the drywall and isn't happy.