Yep, the mania continues. Fueled by fresh ground Starbucks (from the bag, we’re not fancy enough to have a Starbucks in town. I think we’re the only town in America without one, actually.) we spread our chaose into one of our spare bedrooms this past Saturday. Overall, it’s not a bad room at all. It is fairly large, has a closet and three big windows, and gets the most light of any room in the house. It’s biggest problem was the plaster ceiling – after years of a leaking roof, it was crumbling right off. When we took the drop ceilings out last year, everything else came down with them and it looked like this for about 6 months:

But we made some repairs and snuck nice new drywall up there back when we rented the drywall jack. So the hard part was essentially done – no overhead lifting of 4×12 sheets of drywall for this girl. Whooo.

Unfortunately, the drop ceiling grid had been nailed into the plaster, and the nail holes ended up ruining much of the top part of the walls. There was also had about 8 layers of wallpaper border up there, and the stuff flat out refused to come off. It took me about 30 minutes to scrape down a 1′ wide section. Frustrated and tired, we decided to forgo “saving” this top foot or so of plaster. But we did want to keep the rest of it, so we took a circular saw and ran it around the room, cutting off the border and removing any chunks of plaster that was no longer sticking to the lathe.

This particular demolition tactic worked much better than I expected, taking only about an hour. It was messy, but not nearly as messy as gutting the room would have been. Minus the bad plaster, it ended up looking like this:

Within a few hours, we had new drywall patched in around the entire room. I know it’s not exactly cool to mix drywall with plaster, but we’re not hardcore preservationists and at this point in our remodeling process we’ve given up on “perfect” in exchange for “done”.

We bondo’d all the big cracks, and once that was dry we made quick work of the seam taping.