18 Million Cracks

in my bathroom. Trust me-- I'm not making light of those more important 18 million cracks*; I'm just getting a little concerned about the stability of the joints in my bathroom.

I was a taking a shower a few days ago (I've taken them since!), and I noticed what looked like mildew in the grout lines. Admittedly, I'd noticed them before, and bought some extra heavy duty tub and tile cleaner. But this time I stuck a fingernail in the grout line...


I think these are actually places where the grout is beginning to fail. Morelike, has already failed. There's quite a few of them. My other guess was that perhaps there was a darker grout to begin with and someone decided to regrout in white. The floor looks like maybe it was a darker grout, not just stained. (We're clean people-- I swear!).

So I'm thinking-- and correct me if I'm going about this all wrong-- I'm going to clean the grout in the tub/shower and walls well with a soft brush and regrout. The sticking point is that it's the whole bathroom's wainscoting, but I think that if I just pay special attention to the areas of failure and do the entire thing with the same batch using a good float, then I should be good, right?

Then I noticed this:


That's the hot water knob in the tub. And that black thing you see is a hole. Bondo and some chrome paint? I know I should just replace them, but I LOVE these knobs. The hole is on the backside and they're perfectly vintage for the rest of the bathroom...Or can you buy those sleeve things separately?

Then, there's the crack between shower and window:


Trust-- the first thing I want to do in this joint is paint the trim. The most recent paint job was done with FLAT paint. Sigh. Dirty fingers galore. However, you'll see that the first thing I ought to do, is address the "why you shouldn't just grout your tile to wood" issue. Clean it out and caulk it, I assume.

An finally, the real crack in the ceiling that haunts me daily:


The AC guys did this and offered to knock a few hundred dollars off the total if I let it go. I was fresh off the kitchen drywalling, so I thought this was the bargain of the century and a good opportunity to practice my texturing. I'm not so worried about the texture as I am about the sheetrock falling down. I think my plan is to perhaps put a couple of drywall screws into the portions that are sagging-- there's plaster with lathe underneath, so it's something for the screws to go into, and they don't have to hold the weight of the whole sheet; just the little saggy bits. Then tape and mud and patch as otherwise.

It's a little daunting, but should be a good trial run for repairing and successfully cammoflaging the, ahem, canyon in our other ceiling:


This weekend was a bit of a dud, so we've promised ourselves greater progress next weekend. We want that final inspection and we want it now. Or at least before the permit is a year old. Yikes.

*After the last 10 days, politically speaking, I feel I need humor more than ever. I'm getting a little worried.

We got walls

In fact, we got some pretty good walls, if I do say so myself. Mudded, taped, and primed. My dad built houses when I was a kid, and luckily I picked up some drywall skills through osmosis-- I sure didn't get any by paying attention. The job's not perfect and we still only have the primer coat on, but I don't think we're going to need to do any texturing (touch wood). We also got the lower cabinets moved into place. (Apologies for the blurry pics-- I forgot to put new batteries into the camera, so I had to use the phone.)


I have to give credit where it's due-- I'm a big fan of the metal reinforced inside corner tape. We bought it by accident at the hardware store, but it turned out to be the perfect material for one particularly wonky corner. Some previous owners, many years ago, tacked a modular broom closet onto the end of the pantry. I wasn't a perfect fit, so once the plaster was gone, there was about an inch wide gap between the wood broom closet and the corner stud, with nails spanning the distance at an angle...we had to bevel the drywall and then I did some fancy footwork with the tape and...voila! a corner with only a ghost of a seam. We also ended up with an outside corner that was essentially too big for normal metal corner beading. I used the paper-backed metal instead since there was nothing to screw into...So far so good. I couldn't find any installation instructions, so I just slathered on a ton of joint compound, pressed it into place and got rid of the excess with a trowel-- I basically treated it like any other taped seam. We'll see how well it stands up to the refrigerator door.

Then, after mopping up the drywall dust, we got to see the floors for the first time-- we'd never mopped up the water-soluble mastic, so it was quite a nice surprise. We did a little bit of spot sanding under the lip of the cabinets-- the water damage is pretty obvious, but I think a darkish stain will hide a lot of problems. Then we sanded part of the cabinets-- the facing is indeed solid wood, and a careful pass with a belt sander does wonders.

Still not sure what to do about our living room walls-- we took the chair rail off to open the room up a little (it didn't seem like original molding) and apparently there had been a lot of painting around the rail over the years. There's now a lip of built up paint. We sanded it down some, but the walls have been textured at some point. I guess we'll try to match the texture. Time to start sampling!

Still a lot to do, but we're making progress.

Getting things done...

This last week was pretty productive in terms of getting the kitchen walled up. As I mentioned before, we can't get our final inspection until the kitchen has walls. Being 80 years old, the house doesn't have a square joint in it, so cutting the drywall was quite a process, especially for us amateurs, and there were a lot of little annoyances that kept making the job harder. We had to get a couple of rotted spots in the floor patched. Then we had the issue of an old doorway to what we can only assume was a butler's pantry-- you can still see the trim for the doorway in the laundry/mud room, which appears to have at one time been two rooms: a pantry and a small back porch landing. Anyway, we got that framed in and were finally able to hang the excessively heavy 5/8" drywall:


Yeah, there's some pretty big, gaping seams-- and we're no experts on taping and mudding. But most of the walls will be covered in appliances and cabinets and framed prints...and maybe even some textured paint to forgive the many sins that we and every other previous owner has committed in this room.

In addition to finishing our drywall hanging (which you can imagine involved a lot of cursing and quite a few ruined boards), we got the house cleaned up, made 2 trips to the dump, finished our backyard privacy fence, got one gas line added for the stove and removed a couple that were no longer needed. We'll get the gas turned on today, hopefully, so we can be sure to check every pipe that's been messed with; and we have the start up scheduled for our new heat pump tomorrow-- and just in time, as it's supposed to get wicked cold tomorrow night.

As you can see, we've started the mudding process, and one of my big goals this week is to get the next 2 coats on and sanded. I will also be sanding down the little paint strip left by the removal of the living room chair rail and primering as much of the house as possible. We'll try to get the kitchen floor sanded and the cabinets back in place. We still have a giant gable vent to build. We need to get the house as ready as possible for the inspection and for the big sanding and finishing of the rest of the floors. And then I think we'll be in a position to move in.

But I gotta tell you-- it's been awfully hard to get much done with the outdoors as pretty as this:

There's a ten year old girl in there somewhere...