Friday, April 29, 2022

Preserving the plaster

When we bought this lovely old Victorian house Chris and I had a discussion about the difference between a renovation and a restoration. I said I wanted to keep as much of the original bones of the house as was reasonable. Of course we want to make it a liveable comfortable home, but we don’t want to destroy the very things that we purchased it for. At the time for me that included the plaster walls. One approach to renovating older homes is to tear out all of the plaster and simply use Jip rock because of the speed and ease of that process. I should’ve thought about that when I said no let’s keep the plaster walls. Well we certainly couldn’t have lived in the home while the walls were all taken out, it hasn’t been exactly a cakewalk living in it With the plaster remaining. I have this belief that plaster is hydrophobic, cleaning it requires more than just water you need soap and water and constant clean cloths. Then there’s the truth that every single wall in my house is covered with wallpaper, many layers of it . 


This is what is left in the hallway. Only three layers there. The top layer is already gone. 

The milk paint remains after the wall paper is gone. 


It took almost four hours to do this part of the hallway. 


Then there’s the fact that I have to wash them before they can be repaired and skim coated. 


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