Despite Everything…

…I continue to fix my house. Even though I believe its value is greatly diminished due to the infiltration of gasoline vapours. Even though the air quality may be periodically unsafe. Where else could I go ?

At present, my bedroom overlooks the gas station parking lot. I can hear the tire compressor, loud car stereos, conversations, idling delivery trucks, and it all drives me nuts and interrupts my sleep.

I am switching rooms to move my bedroom to the quietest location. However, this means I have to fix two rooms to do this – as the future bedroom had to have the contents displaced, and my present bedroom has sloping ceilings that my bookcases would not fit under.

The first room in progress is the west bedroom – the biggest and brightest of the bedrooms. It also had a tragic ceiling and rough walls, painted with that dastardly “Jackson Tan” chocolate milk color. The previous owner tried to fix the ceiling with really incomplete knowledge of what this entailed. There were large areas of shaggy, half scraped off wallpaper, painted over, NINE patches using drywall that was too thick (affixed with wood screws that were too short, not even drywall screws), lots of blobs of joint compound and visible fiberglass mesh tape.

Since the space upstairs is limited, I had to work around the three large bookcases that were already in the room. I emptied them, and pushed them around as necessary to access the wall or ceiling. All the books were displaced, which meant tall stacks in the bedroom. The contents went into the rest of the house, everywhere, a big mess.

I don’t know how many plaster washers I used, or how many buckets of joint compound I went through. I skim coated, and re-skim coated, then skim coated some more to minimize the frankenstein monster ceiling. The walls had the same terrible plaster present in the rest of the house, with the crumbling scratch coat and the 3mm thick finish coat.

All the trim had been painted with the same water based enamel, the one that had the iffy preparation upstairs in the hall. I had to scrape and sand that, then paint it all out with adhesion primer. The Queen Anne style windows each had 16 small panes of stained glass, 1/3 of which were pressed pattern glass on the inside, so these all had to be carefully cut in as it is very difficult to scrape paint off textured glass.

Every step went so slowly and laboriously. I could only fix 3/4 of the walls and ceiling, because of the bookcases in the way. This meant I had to work to finish one area while another area hadn’t been touched yet. This made the room extra ugly and chaotic feeling.

Sanding was horrible, especially the ceiling. Because of the large areas that were skim coated I had to use extra stinky oil based primer, which stuck in my hair, skin, glasses.

Finally the point came where the walls and ceiling were unremarkable looking again. They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t shaggy and cracked, with visible drywall patches anymore.

Realtor’s photo expressing the “potential” for this room, with very lightened wall color, and an inflatable bed impersonating a bedroom suite. It looks pleasant but the actual reality of the wall and ceiling situation was minimized, to say the least:

The ceiling after scraping off the loose paint and remaining wallpaper:

How much repair the walls needed. They were all this bad:

Finally the room was done enough. Not perfect but fine:

Now I get to repeat this process in the future bedroom, which has equally bad walls but a slightly less bad ceiling. No textured glass to paint around at least:

There is an iffy bulkhead (not shown) I am trying to leave alone and three sconces attached to giant, large, thick wood needle – like objects. I suspect there were major incisions made in the plaster to wire the sconces, so instead of fixing the plaster these goofy things were made to cover that. Are the electrical boxes properly and safely situated ? I’ll have to get those clunky things off to find out…

To get away from the gas station noise and light I will do this.