Up Against the Wall

This is my wall.

It's a lovely wall. It separates my upstairs office from the stairwell. It helps hold up the roof. It's a handy place to hang pictures. But it needs... something.

Like most of the third floor, this wall had been covered in drywall (Sheetrock) at some time in its past. And also like much of the third floor, the work had been done inexpertly. This wall also had a light fixture hacked into it (on the other side where you can't see), but without benefit of an electrical junction box. The wires just poked through a hole in the plaster where wire nuts fixed it to the light. Not entirely kosher and not to my liking.

Finally, my room had no light switch anywhere. It had electrical outlets, but nothing on a switch, so you couldn't just walk into the room and flick on a light. All of this needed fixing.

The only way to get at the electrical wiring, of course, is to open the wall, and because it's just drywall I wasn't too worried about that. We're not sentimental about drywall; it's just historic plaster and lath that we try to preserve. Sheetrock? Pfft. Out it comes.

My secret hope was that my room would be like Kathy's room, in the sense of having cool old redwood paneling hidden behind the drywall. In that case, removing the drywall would be a good deed. I was looking forward to exposing the old redwood.

No such luck. Instead, this room seems to have been constructed like an Old West saloon in some ghost town that had no carpenters. There's old wood behind the drywall, all right, but it's not something you'd want to display. It's ratty and ill-fitting and has big gaps in it. It's like some shantytown shelter made from scrap. Bummer.

To cover up this iffy construction, our predecessors had covered the wall with painted fabric. We've found this stuff elsewhere in the house. It's like rough woven linen covered with a thick coat of painted paper. The fabric covering is attached to the wall with small nails (which I've saved) that are on the underside of the painted layer, so they don't show. Not sure how that was done, but it appears to have been common practice.

For the record, I did not cut away the fabric covering as you see it here. That was done much earlier, probably when the wall fixture (the one on the other side) was first installed. They would have had to cut into the wall somehow to route the wires. That explains why some of the covering is missing, and why the nails in the wooden boards don't all match. Some are quite old, square-headed nails while others are newer round nails (1930s? 1960s?). Too bad they didn't install a proper junction box while they were at it. It would've saved me a lot of trouble.

Anyway, now that I've got the wall open, I can fix all of these problems at once. First, I installed a junction box in the wall to support the wall fixture. It's supported by a cross-brace nailed between two studs. (You can't see it in this photo.)

Second, I added the light switch that you see here near the door. It switches one-half of the new outlet near the floor, as well as the new wall fixture in this room.

Third, I removed a lot of the old drywall and replaced it with new. I figured there's no way to dress up the underlying wooden boards to make them nice enough to expose, so I might as well just cover them all up again like before. But at least now I know what's behind there.

Here's a peek into the knob-and-tube wiring that was behind the wall. I like how they twisted the wires around the ceramic knobs for strain relief.

Why three wires? Because one is hot, one's neutral, and one's a traveler between a pair of three-way switches. Yes! They had three-way switches even back in the day!

Finally, here's a century of wiring history in one snapshot. There's the original knob-and-tube wiring coming up through the floor (from three stories down), against some new 14/2 Romex that now does the job. Behind that, you can see the black coax cable for broadband Internet, along with the gray CAT5e cable for the LAN.

Now that I think about it, I should have added a fiber-optic cable just to make it look really modern and up-to-date. Oh, well. Wires will probably be obsolete soon, anyway.

Mister Angry-Face Door

We're updating the trim on the third floor, which involves a lot of woodwork, painting, nails, and dust. One of the many chores involves stripping the old paint off of Kathy's door, which may have had about 100 coats of paint on it.

Rather than add a 101st coat, we decided to strip off the old paint, so we took the door outside to work on it. Pro Tip: It's hard to move a door down three flights of stairs. For starters, doors don't always fit through doorways. Makes sense, I know, but you don't think of that until it's too late. We often had to turn the door sideways to fit it through.

Stripping the old paint was more work than I expected (naturally). It doesn't just magically fall off. What I anticipated to be a few hours' work instead took two full days. There was a *lot* of paint on that door, and it didn't all want to come off. I counted about six colors before I gave up and called it "good enough."

Interestingly, the oldest coats of paint were the hardest to remove. Maybe that's because they used better-quality paint back in the day, or maybe it's because it was oil-based instead of latex, or maybe it's just been on there so long that it doesn't want to come off. Whatever the reason, the last few coats are still there; they're not coming off. No amount of paint stripper would remove them, so I just sanded them smooth instead. Let's call it primer.

Complicating the issue was the detail work on the door. This is the same pattern that appears on most of our doors, and it involves lots of fiddly little grooves that aren't easy to scrape or clean. It's hard to scrape off the paint without gouging the woodwork, so patience is important. Patience and sandpaper. Lots of sandpaper.

Ultimately, I got it to the state you see here. It's not perfect, but it should hold a coat of paint without looking too bad.

I decided -- too late -- to put on a dust mask while I was scraping off all this old paint. I suspect most of the paint was lead-based, and my throat feels kinda funny now, but oh, well.

Tell me what you see, but I count more than six layers of paint here. There's the white top coat, then the red underneath that, then the green, then another coat of white, then the brown, then a lighter shade of brown, and then... who knows. I do know there's a yellowish layer underneath that I never did remove, so that makes at least seven. For the record, we're painting the door white. We'll post pictures when it's all done.