Builders Share

Beat the Clock

With the tile down and the grout sealed, I was ready to start installing the wainscoting.  Remember, guests are due and I want to get the upstairs sink and toilet installed so that there are two facilities in the house.  I don't want to install these fixtures temporarily for the sake of our friends' visit.  I want to use their arrival as an incentive to get this job done.

The wainscoting had to go in before I could install the fixtures, and before I installed the wainscoting, I had trim out the windows and door. 

In trimming the window I decided to make the "stop" the full width of the jamb.  This served to cover the jamb, which was in pretty rough shape, and its extension which I had added some time back to make up the difference in the thicker wall.  (See: Window Jamb Extensions - March 1)  The problem with this approach is that if/when I have to remove the window sash, I'll have to pull out a large piece of the trim which won't be as easy as removing a narrow window stop.  But overall, with the gnarly jambs encased, the trimmed window will look a lot neater.

Doing this kind of finish work ranks with the more satisfying tasks in the renovation project.  It's a nice mix of thought and handiwork that goes into getting a pleasing result.  One of the drawbacks of my current situation is that the power saws are out in the driveway.  That means having to be extra careful with my measurements unless I want to be making several long trips for a single cut.

With the windows trimmed, I was ready to get started on the wainscoting. I decided to concentrate on finishing the walls behind the toilet and sink first, then if I had time, I would continue with trimming out the door and adding wainscoting to the remaining walls.

The challenge with the wainscoting was deciding how to mount it.  On the exterior walls there is 1x3 strapping behind the plasterboard but not all in convenient places for mounting the wainscot boards.  The wall studs are over 2 inches deep from the surface of the wall because of the sandwich of plasterboard, strapping, and rigid insulation, so reaching those as anchors was out of the question.  The recommended method is using construction adhesive, but I wasn't sure how that would bond with the veneer plaster.  (Back when I was plastering, if I had known I was going to use wainscoting I probably wouldn't have plastered that section of the wall.)  I decided to go with a combination of construction adhesive and nails in the spots where I was certain there was strapping behind the plasterboard.

After the wainscoting was up I was ready to cap it with some bull-nosing and coping trim and then install the baseboard.  Next up, the toilet and sink go in.

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Baseboards

We've already decided to go ahead and move into the upstairs rooms before all the trim and finish work was complete, but I wanted to at least get the baseboards installed so that we wouldn't have to move all the furniture when it came time to do the finish work.

I didn't expect installing the baseboards would take long, but I've also come to understand the nature of my expectations with regard to renovation tasks.

Before covering up the corner where the wall meets the floor, I donned the rubber gloves and sprayed a bead of foam insulation along the outside walls.  This would be one more break against the cold drafts of winter which seems particularly far away today when the temperature is 95 degrees in the shade.

I've learned to detest working with spray foam insulation because it has a way of getting on everything within reach and is nearly impossible to clean without creating a toxic waste dump.  One thing to help me deal with my foam insulation issues was purchasing a professional foam gun.  This has made both controlling the flow of the foam and cleaning up much easier than it was when using the consumer level spray foam in a can.  It may also be that after doing so much foaming, I've actually gotten a little more careful.

One thing I made sure to do when foaming the gap at the base of the floor was to use some masking tape to protect the new paint job.  After the foam was dry, I cut off the excess using a hand saw and was ready to install the baseboard.

I decided to go with the less expensive pine stock for the baseboards.  The clear pine, that is the stuff without any knots, is twice the price.  The lower grade stock looks more interesting with its knots and goes along with our farm/cottage-style house and decor.  There are so many places in the course of the renovation where spending just a little more money might improve things, or at least make the house look classier(?) but each of those things continues to add to a bottom line that's already eaten up our savings.  There's a constant pull to go for the "high-end" in everything.  I enjoy architectural bling as much as anyone, but where do you draw the line?  I try to gain as much pleasure as I can finding the least expensive, but serviceable way.  It's a nice way of being cheap.

I put a coat of water-based polyurethane on the boards before cutting and installing them, but I intend to add another coat once they're installed.  I like the natural wood look.  If we change our minds and want to paint it later, it shouldn't be a problem using latex over the water-based poly.

Installing the baseboards brought out the unevenness of the floor.  In some cases I tried to bend the board a little to minimize the gap along the floor, and also planed the boards some, but it both instances this only went so far.  I realize now where molding might come in handy as a way to close the gap and I'm considering one that might look appropriate...

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Color Wheel

Okay, I'm over the primed vs. tint debacle.  Putting color on the walls, however, is starting to make my head spin.  Part of it is still the strong desire to get this work done so that we can move into the space.  But there's also a kind of madness that can take over when it comes to trying to choose colors for your walls.  Interior designers and color theorists have banked on that madness for years.

Two years ago, when we were just getting ready to move into the downstairs, we went about choosing colors in hopes we could get the rooms painted before move day.  Well we didn't get the rooms painted but we did set on three colors based on a palette provided by a Benjamin Moore brochure.  The only color we were able to get on the wall before moving in was "cream yellow" in the kitchen.

A few days ago I started putting "secret garden" on the wall of the master bedroom.  My first thought was, "What the hell were we thinking?"  The color that I remembered as a soft pastel red was looking decidedly hot pink on the wall. I immediately started to think disaster had struck, I had wasted $70 odd dollars on paint, and I was never going to make the June 1st deadline. (Do I seem a little touchy about this deadline thing?) 

Anyway, Benjamin Moore has a cool website that lets you see how some basic rooms would look in different colors including how washes and tints of one color might look over the base of another color.  I plugged "secret garden" in as a base color and started trying out color washes of various darker reds.  "Navajo red," "copper clay," "smoldering red," "the deadline is looming red," were all worthy options for toning down the hot pink "secret garden."  We decided on "smoldering red" and rushed off to the paint store.

This time, I was going to be smart.  I brought a couple of large scrap pieces of sheet rock upstairs, primed them and then applied a base coat of "secret garden" allowing a couple hours for the primer to dry.

While "secret garden" was heating up on the scrap sheet rock, I got to work painting the boy's room with the third color we had chosen two years ago when our tastes were questionable.  With trepidation I popped open the can of "feather soft."  Whew! A lovely soft, purplish blue peaked out at me.  Somewhere between the color of lilacs and forget-me-nots with a dash of periwinkle and maybe a bit of... How do they come up with these colors?  ...I happily started covering the walls of my son's room.

After finishing the first coat of "feather soft" in Ramon's room, I was ready to experiment with adding a wash of "smoldering red" over the base of "secret garden" that I put on one of the test boards.  The other test board was only primed with white to see what a wash would look like over that.

The results  gave me some hope.  A wash of "smoldering red" over "secret garden" showed  promise even if the names might lead one to think of a forest fire in a nudist colony.  We decided to think about it for a day or two and meanwhile I've put down the base of  "secret garden" on the rest of the walls in the master bedroom.

And now after seeing the master bedroom with one coat of "secret garden" throughout, I'm starting to have second thoughts about my second thoughts.  Maybe  I'm getting used to this hot pink. Maybe it's not so hot pink after all.  It certainly is cheery.  But will I be able to hang onto a bad mood in a room this color?  Will my fellow biker gang members give me a hard time?  Wait, I'm not in a biker gang.  Maybe this could work.  Is this the deadline talking? Can a man be a man in pink room? Maybe if I stock the bookcase with Norman Mailer novels...

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Plastered

Sometime last week I plastered my last wall (ever? I don't know).  Applying the veneer plaster was exhausting work and it feels good to know it's done.  The first few walls weren't difficult but after several days of troweling plaster, I thought my arm might fall off. 

The task itself was a mix of fun and stress.  The skill required to spread the plaster evenly and then smooth it out was fun but the need to get through the task before the plaster set up too much was stressful.  Though I got help from my friend Matt one day and my wife mixed plaster a couple of times too, I mixed and applied most of the batches myself which took a fair amount of energy.  All the buckets and tools had to be cleaned constantly to prevent the plaster from setting up on them and taking care of that on top of troweling the walls is something that's best done by two people.  But again, I had to do the work when I was able, not necessarily when I had a helper.

I'm happy with how the job came out.  There were some mistakes along the way where I left more trowel marks in a few places than I hoped, but overall the walls look good.  They have a texture to them and each one is a little different than the other.  As the light goes from morning to afternoon, the character of each wall changes a bit giving each room more character than if I had simply used sheetrock.

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Hanging Rock

The drywall used for walls taking a coat of veneer plaster is called blue board.  It's the same as your typical sheet rock except that the paper cover is specially treated to react chemically with the plaster. This creates a strong bond between the plaster and the drywall. Plaster can be applied to regular sheet rock as well, but it's best to treat it with a bonding agent first.

As far as hanging the drywall, it's best done with help, and when it came time for covering the high ceiling and steeply sloped walls in the master bedroom, I got some.  But most people have better things to do than help their friends hang drywall so I felt that if I still wanted friends, I should contract the work out or do it myself, and since I've taken the DIY aesthetic to obsessive levels, I did it myself.

There are two techniques I know of for hanging drywall alone.  One is to use a drywall lift. The other is to mount a cleat on the wall for propping up one edge of the sheet while you hold the sheet with one hand and drive in screws with the other.  Drywall lifts are available to rent at places like Home Depot, but I wasn't likely to get all the work done quickly enough to make it cost effective to rent one.  I used the cleat method along with a few 5 gallon buckets of elbow grease and got the job done. There was only one serious mishap where I was trying to mount a 10' sheet on the ceiling in the upstairs hallway.  The cleat did its job but my one hand wasn't enough to keep the sheet from collapsing under its own weight.  One large piece of blue board fell to pieces supported by a soundtrack of expletives.

Drywall is usually screwed into place though there are some places where hanging it using roofing nails is accepted. That's the way it was hung before the screw gun came into wide use.  I hung mine using 1-1/4" drywall screws and since I didn't have a drywall screw gun, I used my Makita cordless drill with a special bit for counter-sinking the screws.  It's important that the screw heads are sunk slightly into the drywall to hide them from the finished surface.

Once the drywall was hung, I covered the joints and the inside corners with fiberglass mesh tape. On the outside corners I tacked fine-mesh corner bead which protects them from damage.  The fine mesh type is used especially for veneer plaster applications.  Most applications use a regular metal corner bead.

In the places where sloped walls met with vertical, I used a special metal flex tape that has two parallel metal strips sandwiched between paper with a space in the center for making a bend.  This tape helps to create a straight corner where there's an odd angle.

The joints and the screws were then all covered with a couple of coats of Durabond 90 jointing compound.  This is a setting type compound that comes as powder, is mixed with water, and then sets up in a short time to be super hard.  It's stronger than the typical plastic joint compound but it's much harder to sand so isn't usually used as a finish coat.  Since I was going to plaster over everything, sanding wasn't an issue.

With the drywall mounted and jointed, I was ready to start with the plaster.

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p.s. Check out the following Builders Square animated How-to Tutorials associated with this post:

Hanging Drywall
Hanging Drywall on the Ceiling
Taping Drywall

Layer Upon Layer

It'll probably take a couple of weeks to get all the plastering done --again, the DIY dilemma of only being able to work on the project in my "spare" time-- so I'll go back to describing the work it took to get to this point.

Like in the downstairs walls, after I installed new electrical and plumbing service, I filled the stud bays with pink fiberglass bats on both the exterior walls (for insulation) and the partition walls (for soundproofing). I then installed 1" rigid foam board insulation over the top of the studs of the exterior walls.  Downstairs I used 1/2" foam boards, but the 1" boards provide double the R-factor for about $6 more per sheet, and since I used fewer than 20 sheets upstairs, I've significantly increased the R-factor in my walls for less than the cost of two nights in a flea bag motel.

Putting the thicker foam boards on the upstairs walls meant an extra step in the rebuilding process though.  With the 1/2" foam boards, I was able to mount the sheet rock right over the insulation using 2" drywall screws that could pass through both materials and anchor soundly to the wall studs.  With 1" foam boards, sending a screw through 1-1/2" of material before reaching a wall stud wouldn't make for a strong enough wall; so I needed to install a layer of wood strapping over the insulation to provide a strong surface to mount the drywall to.  The gap between the drywall and insulation created by the strapping is also a nice little dead air space that bumps up the R-factor of the wall a little more as well.

Here's a quick sketch of the cross-section of my walls on the second floor.

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Plaster: Master or Disaster Part 2

Plastering continued this week as I start down the home stretch towards finishing the upstairs.  It's a long home-stretch as there's trim work to do and tiling the bathroom, installing the tub and sink, and installing the electrical outlets, and then...

But getting the walls covered is a big step to giving the place a finished look.  Today I got help from my friends Matt and Nathaniel, and my son Ramon.  For covering the large surfaces, it's essential to have at least one person mixing while another one or two applies plaster.  Enjoy the show...

Checking the mix

Working the closet

All in the wrist

The mixer delivers

Keep moving before it sets

Keeping it clean

Glad to be done for the day.

Thanks to Cybele Merrick for taking pictures.

Plaster: Master or Disaster

A big step in finishing the upstairs got started this week.  I mixed my first batch of base-coat plaster and went to work skim-coating the walls of the closet in the Master Bedroom.  This was my first foray into plastering so starting with the closets allows me some training surfaces which will stay out of sight to all but those interested in what's hidden in there.  (What Alberto Gonzales and his minions think of my first attempts at plastering means little to me.)

I must admit, I was nervous about this job.  Plastering is a bit of an art and once it sets up and cures on your wall, there's no getting rid of it without some serious demolition.  So I read all the product literature I could find, and got advice from as many people as I could who had experience working with plaster, and then dove in.

The job really requires two people because as you start working on one wall surface, you can't stop until that surface is finished.  If you start running out of plaster, you need someone else to start mixing another batch while you're applying the current one.  I was able to mix up small batches and apply them myself for finishing the closet walls and in only one instance did I run out.  The half-finished wall set-up while I mixed up another batch.  The result of finishing a single surface with two separate sets is a wall that looks like it's been patched.  In the closet, it's not a problem.  It might not be a problem for an oft-seen wall in an old house, but it would stick out if all the other walls don't share the same characteristic.

I'll be getting some help over the next week or so as I take on the rest of the plastering project, but when I'm working alone, I'll have to make sure I mix up batches that are large enough and not mind wasting what doesn't get used.

The tools needing for applying a base-coat of veneer plaster are:

• Plaster hawk
• Trowels (one large, one small) --get good ones, don't skimp
• Base-coat plaster
• Heavy-duty 1/2" drill with cage style mixer
• 2 clean 5 gallon buckets, one containing a few gallons of cool clean water
• 1 large bucket or tub with water for cleaning smaller buckets and tools
• Table, about 30"x30" covered with plastic for serving up mixed plaster batches
• Rosin paper for covering all the floors.

The process for mixing a small batch goes like this:

1. Cover all your work area floors with rosin paper.  A lot of plaster will hit the floor as you work and it's not easy to clean up.  This is no joke.
2. Add about a quart of cool clean water to the clean dry bucket. (Note the emphasis on clean. Impurities in the mix will affect how the plaster sets.)
3. Start sifting some dry plaster into the water and begin mixing it with the cage mixer.  Keep adding dry plaster and mixing until the mix starts to "peak".  You want the plaster to be a consistency somewhere between yogurt and peanut butter.  You need to be able to move it around with the trowel without a lot of effort but you also want to be able to transfer it from hawk to wall without it sliding off onto the floor.
4. When you think you've got the right consistency, mix it some more to make sure it's all mixed in but don't mix it for more than 5 minutes altogether.  The more you mix it, the faster it'll set and generally speaking, you don't want it to set-up quickly.
5. Dump the batch onto the plastic covered table, getting as much out of the bucket as you can.
6. Clean the bucket and the heavy-duty mixer.  This is where a helper comes in handy.  You need to get the tools and mixing bucket clean before you start mixing another batch, and before the plaster sets up on them.
7. Now to get it on the wall.  Scoop some of the mixture onto your hawk and head to the wall/ceiling.  With some wrist action, use the trowel to pick up plaster from the hawk and slop it onto the wall.  Spread out the plaster, get some more and repeat.  Work from one corner towards the center and if it's a wall, from the top down.  When you get near the floor, be careful not to pick up any dirt. Don't work the material too much, just get it on the wall with a relatively uniform thickness.
8. Once you've got the wall covered, let it start to set up.  Once it has started to set a little, use your trowel to smooth it out, again not working it too much, just one pass if possible.  This is where you'll be glad you spent a little more and got a good trowel.
9. If you're doing more than one wall with a given batch, work on opposite walls, not adjoining ones.  You'll want to finish the adjoining wall after the current one has set up well.

When I get some helpers on the job, I'll be able to take some action photos...

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