This place was the waiters' station when the house was a restaurant. It's about the size of a phone booth (a tall phone booth; the ceiling is 12 feet high) and had a pass-through to the commercial kitchen. At one time there was a filtered-water supply for refilling customers' water glasses. Oh, and six electrical outlets -- each one on a different circuit breaker. Weird.
The room was painted dark brown from floor to ceiling and had homemade shelves on all four walls. The effect was very claustrophobic. The shelves came down after the first month, which only exposed a second weirdness: two of the walls had been skimmed with plywood over the original plaster, probably to support the shelves. Or maybe not...
Anyway, today the plywood started coming off. Harder than it sounds, when you don't want to damage the underlying plaster or lath. There's really nothing to lean on for leverage, so I sort of eased the wood away from the plaster and then pushed it back to expose the nail heads. Tedious, but it seems to work.
I'm not sure the result is any better. The plaster is still damaged, and I count at least four colors/layers of paint. The wainscoting has been painted and, in some cases, cut away. We'll have to strip the paint and repair the wood. Somehow.
Our hope is to repaint this little room white by the weekend. We'll let you know how it goes.
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