After several weeks of rehab from a surgery ( a whole nuther story altogether for another day or another blog post – maybe), we are delving into more house projects. The summer project we are taking on is “Paint”. The house is in tremendous need of a good coat of new paint, maybe two coats. It’s been a large white house for many many years. White unfortunately collects dust and shows the years of grime and mold. It also reveals the bad paint jobs underneath unfortunately.
We (I use the term loosely, I’m just bossing my husband around and assisting on select occasions – but I still consider it “hands-on”!) started with some big yard clean up, removing all the plants around the foundation. It has a collection of old azalea, rhodies and camelia bushes that have grown to trunks near 10 inches around. Some are probably near 70 years old we calculate.
this allowed us to get up to the house to scrape, clean, and perform all the prep work, including cleaning out gutters and removing shutters. You can see it took us a while to get to the paint part given the new growth of the bushes we left. But summer was slow in getting here to Oregon.
We removed about 6 truck loads full of just yard debris. It’s exciting progression on this long term project!
Next blog post – Paint!
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We had a couple walls that had some water damage. The water damage created a unique situation where as the walls are concrete/plaster mix and lathe, covered with a brown coat then a smooth plaster(lime) coat then paint (I did a lot of reading on sites like this historic home preservation, which by the way was an overall great source to learn about the home I am in – a great read and source of info). The water, from an upstairs bathroom, mostly drained down between the walls all the way to the basement, but a good amount – or enough, soaked to the surface and separated the brown coat from the very thin plaster coat and it came off in sheets. Fortunately the source of the leak was corrected, but the damage remained and the homeowners didn’t know what to do, so they left it.
(note the gray and brown blotches, the brown is a powdery dry coat that does not stick together anymore, it’s called the brown coat, the gray part is the actual hard plaster. Fortunately the plaster did not lose it’s key or lock with the lathe system)
As we were painting and cleaning, it seemed to be unnoticed for a while until we started cleaning the walls and the plaster sheets just came off. To clean it up you have to keep peeling it away until it stops, and for a horrific amount of time and distance, it didn’t appear to stop. We got the surface cleaned up, and had to clean off the brown coat down to the plaster/concrete walls, to prep the walls for a smooth finish again. After a lot of scraping, cleaning, vacuuming and sweeping it up, we had a clean surface to work with. then in reverse, we smoothed on the plaster (goes on pink – dries white, when it’s ready to sand). We sanded, swept, vacuumed and repeated, about 2 times to be sure all the areas had a good coating, sanded smooth and sealed.
Then we painted about 2 coats of good quality primer sealer, drying between each. Only then could we apply the finish paint. Taking the time for all the steps before, painting was the easiest part. And we call it success! I can tell where my work and the craftsmen of old work meet, but I don’t have to point it out to anyone. I am happy with it and know that it won’t be flaking off anytime soon.
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