We may take some slack from the restoration community because of it, but we’ve demo’d out the rest of the lath and plaster in the house this past weekend. We weighed the pros and cons and the pros to demo well outweighed keeping and maintaining the plaster. It didn’t help that our neighbors recently restored their plaster and on the day they were finally going to paint the final coat, new cracks had emerged.

Another plus is that we were able to do a full inpection of the framing and can now properly insulate the rest of the house.

We removed all the baseboards, window and door trim and took them to be dipped and stripped. Once the new drywall is installed, we will reinstall the original fir trim that will be beautifully stained to match the rest of the house.

As I type this, a crew is at the house stripping all our built-ins, fireplace bookshelves and window sashes in place. We are having the drywallers work around those features as there was NO WAY I was ripping out those beautiful built-ins. I also really love our original windows. I’m not totally evil-to-the-core to install vinyl.

What we hope at the end will be a period-looking restoration minus the vile plaster (as you can tell I’m not a fan). Sure the finish of plaster looks good, but just skim coating with drywall materials sort of negates textbook “restoration” in my opinion as well. And I don’t have $11,000 to hire a true plasterer. Photos to come and hopefully, if we’ve done our job right, no one will be able to tell the difference! :)

5 Responses to “Well, we’ve done it”

1. Eric says:

   July 21, 2009 at 12:34 pm

   What rooms are you demoing / remodeling?
2. trudy says:

   July 23, 2009 at 9:04 pm

   Man, I can’t believe you destroyed lathe and plaster. Why didn’t you buy a new house instead of ruining an old one? Someone else could have restored this house if you hadn’t bought it.
3. Hali says:

   September 6, 2009 at 7:27 pm

   We are doing the same thing. We tore out all the plaster and lathe. We sprayed 1″ of foam and insulated the walls. Now we don’t need to waste energy and over heat that room… It’s funny how some people think that YOUR house (and your dream for YOUR house) is community property… funny.
4. Dawn says:

   October 28, 2009 at 9:07 pm

   Miss trudy, we’ve got the new drywall installed and are working on putting the original trim back up. I bet even a purist won’t be able to tell the difference except for the lack of cracks in the walls and ceiling. Those were so great, you know…

   We are restoring the house no matter what you think.
5. Joe says:

   April 23, 2010 at 7:51 am

   Hey, you guys can come over and ‘ruin’ my place anytime!

   I can’t wait to see pics of the finished living and dining rooms. Oh, and I really, Really, REALLY like your new blog design.