Front room
After months of saving,we managed to get around to having a damp course around the house back in summer 2008. Because of this, most of the plaster work inside needed to be removed to about 2m up from floor level.
This was the start of the living room makeover….
The plan was to skim the walls and ceiling once the groundwork was completed.
We stripped the old wallpaper back to start before knocking off the old plaster work. The plaster work has always been bad, almost sand like, so it came off really easily. Needless to say, the house has been filled with dust ever since.
The “demolition” has been spread over many nights after work, trying to get at least one wall cleared every night, but not working too late as to not upset next door.
While the walls were back to brick, I decided it would be an ideal opportunity to channel the walls for the existing trunked cabling. And also to install speaker cable for the surround speakers.
The biggest job in the room was the ceiling. It was made of old lath and plaster. Loads of wooden slats nailed to the joists, followed by a plaster coat. Over the years, the plaster has sagged away from the laths and one corner of the room was obvious.
The simplest solution was to rip down the entire ceiling but we wanted to keep the original plaster coving. My brother in law suggested scoring around the ceiling with a circular saw close to the edges so that when the plaster cam down it wouldn’t take the coving with it. Good idea and it worked really well (apart from my slip when i got a little too close to the coving and tooka chunk out !!).
When the plaster was removed from the ceiling, we were left with a lath filled room for boarding over. All we needed now was the plaster boards and the plasterer.
Neil (the plasterer) was due to board the ceiling one weekend, with my help (cut costs). However, as with every project in this house, it wasn’t as simple as we thought. Because the laths overlapped each other, the first board we scrwed to the ceiling bowed. So it was a case of ripping down all the laths with a couple of claw hammers. What should have taken a couple of hours to finish actually took about eight….
Once all the laths were off, we found that one of the joists was actually lower than the rest, so we had to “pad out” the remainder with extra wood.
Eventually, the boarding was complete (in one day) and the room was ready for the next step. Plastering.
