Dry Walls

Here are a couple of spare pictures from when we installed the stick work "window" in the upstairs hallway.

This shows the near side of the wall partially demolished with the piece dry fit in place. There's a header across the top, jack studs on each side, and a bit of shimming all around to make the window fit snugly.

The dangling light fixture and the remaining green drywall all got pulled down later and replaced. You can just make out a diagonal roof beam toward the back of the picture. We're up on the third floor right under the roof, so it's all angles and intersecting planes up here. You can see how the green ceiling part is all funny angles, too.

The lath and plaster showing through from the far side of the wall are still in good shape. We left that mostly alone but were unsentimental about the drywall on the near side. Ye olde white Romex is obviously new. I left the original cloth-covered wires in place but ran this new wiring alongside them, taking the opportunity to add a three-way switch at each end of the hallway. You can't do that with knob-and-tube wiring.

If you're into woodworking porn, you can see the mill marks on the quarter-sawn redwood studs near the right side of this photo. Like all the lumber, these were probably milled on-site when the house was built in 1892. Everything is cut square-shouldered and measures exactly two inches by four inches, not like today's 2x4s. The redwood has no knots or blemishes, even thought it's completely hidden inside the walls or under the floors. Even the lath is redwood. The trees must have been plentiful at the time. Oh, and the studs here aren't 16" apart like today. More like random spacing. Maybe the builders just eyeballed it.

Whenever I have to cut into the studs (as here), I save the wood and reuse it close to the original location. In this case, the two cut-out sections got reused in Kathy's closet about 6 feet away.

The nails are iron, not steel, and have a square section and slightly irregular square heads. They might have been made on-site, too, although by the 1890s it was common to purchase nails. I heard that in the 1700s it wasn't unusual to burn down old buildings just to reclaim the nails. I think we're pretty well past that now.