I’m certainly no Bob Villa.  I’ll even admit to sitting at a desk in my day job.  But if you do a bit of reading on home construction topics, you realize that there is a central theme to it called “common sense”.  Gravity is trying to pull everything down, heat travels from warm areas to cold areas, electricity will follow the path of least resistance, etc.

Unfortunately, Horace Greeley was right: “Common sense is uncommon.”  Old homes are often great demonstration grounds for this sort of thing. Decades of hacked solutions to immediate problems layer onto neglect and complacency .. perhaps some pictures sum it up best:

Or .. maybe they just got lucky.  I’m still trying to figure out which category our house falls into.  Each new wall we expose reveals new mysteries to decipher.  Today brought two of them.  Tearing down drywall in the stairwell revealed the floor joist framing.  I don’t have a picture yet, and I need to tear out a ceiling somewhere to get a better view .. but I’m certainly puzzled.  And just while I was mulling over the floor joist system, I came upon this:

This interior wall separates the back bedroom from the kitchen/laundry area.  It had lath but no plaster on the bedroom side.  The horrible veneer side was on top of that.  When we pull off the lath, that strange zig-zag pattern of cross bracing appeared.  What’s even more strange, is that the outside wall immediately to the left has the same zig-zag bracing behind the fiberglass bats.  I’m thinking perhaps a sheer wall .. but since nothing in the interior has been obviously “load bearing” I don’t know why this inside wall has the bracing too.  The outside walls on the second floor didn’t have this.  Also, sheer bracing is usually let-in by cutting notches in the vertical 2×4’s, not the other way around.

Obviously I will be taking comments from people more in the know than I am.

Lee and I worked on ripping apart the second upstarts bedroom. We uncovered more lath and plaster. This time we discovered that it had been painted a pale pink. I wonder if this means that I am going to have to paint it that color again to be period appropriate? The only problem is, I am not really a pink room sort of girl.

I like the glass globe in the first picture. It looks interesting and old to me. Yes I do realize that this is not an 1937 light globe. I do plan on reusing it when renovations are redone. It will help give the house an older feel and of course save a few dollars.

The second light fixture I am going to keep also. Well maybe one that is in better condition. Lee doesn’t like it as much as the globe. But he told me that it was because almost every light fixture in the house is this one. Guess they got a good deal or lacked creativity or they were the cheapest they could find at the time.

The third picture is the window sash weight. Its pretty neat looking. Almost all the the old windows sashes still work. I don’t know that I had ever seen one before.

The fourth picture is the window latch. So very neat. We are talking a lot about whether to replace the windows or keep them.

I’ve heard it said that removing lath and plaster from an old house is a sin.  That may be true.  There is a element of permanence and the skilled labor in plastered walls which drywall does not convey.  So why is this post about knocking down plaster walls?  Because the plaster walls in our house are only partially present and covered in glue from horrible veneer paneling.

When we bought the house we did not think there was any lath and plaster.  The main floor living room is knotty pine paneling, the bedrooms are plastered plywood (a trick used in the 1930s to avoid the cost of lath and plaster).  Upstairs the ugly veneer paneling abounded.  As it turns out, the whole second floor was lath and plaster at one time.  During a renovation sometime in the 80s the lath and plaster was ripped off the outside walls, the wiring was updated, and R11 fiberglass bats were added to the second floor walls and ceiling.  The veneer paneling was nailed onto the outside walls and glued over the lath and plaster interior walls.  The staircase was also revamped using drywall.

This image gives a good overview.  The strips of lath wood are visible behind Robin.  The plaster is all over the floor.  The knee wall on the left is undamaged plaster, as the 80s era insulators could get behind it through an access door and thus left it alone.  For anyone with the misfortune of a lath & plaster removal job, I recommend respirators, goggles, and overalls.  Even if your plaster doesn’t contain asbestos, there are decades of dirt, mold, and animal droppings that will cloud into the air and burst out at your eyes.

Another shot of the same wall.  Note the stud framed wall on the far right.  This was part of a closet addition, likely also from the 80s, which covered up sections of plaster and the original chimney.  Yes, that massive floor-to-ceiling structure is the chimney.  It ends a few inches from the roof sheathing.  Guess what?  The chimney was also broke off in the 80s during a re-roofing job when the woodstove was also removed.  The book “Renovating Old Houses” would call that ‘remuddling’.

The grey concrete circle in the chimney makes us wonder if there was original a wood stove on the second floor as well.  The chimney needs to come out too.  It’s out of plumb and probably too small to run a stovepipe through.  When we knock out the first section we’ll know if it had 1, 2, or 3 flues.  I’m voting for 3: a cookstove on the first floor, a woodstove on the first floor, and a woodstove on the second floor.  Then again, the two on the first floor could share a flue.  Now there’s a fire hazard.