The first day of real work was on March 27. Step one of the plan was to strip all the wallpaper. Some of it was pulling away from the wall and there were places cracks had formed in the walls that needed repair.
We started with stripping wallpaper off the plaster walls in the backroom. It kind-of became our experiment room. We found layer after layer of both paint and wallpaper. There were at least 7 layers of wallpaper, possibly more. The only room that didn't have multiple layers was Denny's bedroom, which was stripped years ago by my family. As you saw in the "Before Pictures", the wallpaper in Denny's bedroom came down pretty easily.
I had to work at the hospital on the 27th, so Scott was working at the house solo. It was a painstaking process of scoring, spraying, scraping, scoring, spraying, scraping. He made a spray bottle of fabric softener and water and used that to spray down the wall before scraping. It was the beginning of some important lessons in stripping wallpaper. By the next weekend, we were much smarter.
This is the only picture I have from March 27th. Refer to Lesson #1 (Take good pictures.). It was Scott working in the backroom taking wallpaper off. This was the only room that really got any attention on weekend #1. It was slow going. Turns out, there was a much easier way.
I want to talk a little bit about plaster walls here because I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The walls and ceilings of the Myrtle House are entirely plaster, with the exception of the kitchen (which we haven't dug into yet).
Plastering is an ancient building technique that dates back to the Egyptians and their pyramids! It has been used throughout history to create strong structures that are well insulated and fireproof. Plaster was used for interior and exterior walls in homes during the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Myrtle house, as with many others of this time period, the plaster is laid over lath. Lath is a series of small boards running parallel to the floor in tiny intervals attached to the interior studs and ceiling joists. In the process of plastering, the lath is covered with a thick paste created from lime or gypsum, water, sand and animal hair. The tiny spaces between the lath boards create space for the lime or gypsum plaster material to hold. When the wet plaster is first applied it squishes between the lath boards, creating what is called a 'key'. They key holds the plaster in place as it dries and hardens.
Lath boards in the bedroom
The original plastering process was three steps: a scratch coat, a brown coat, and a finish coat. Each layer had to be applied and allowed to dry before the next layer was applied. It dries as a solid whole piece that feels similar to dried cement. When something interrupts the piece, for example, a nail for a picture or settling of the foundation of the structure, it can cause a crack to run through the entire wall.
I will talk a bit more on plaster as we move through the process of skim coating the walls and repairing the plaster ceilings. Because plaster is part of the historic character of the house, we really wanted to keep it and restore the walls as they stand. So far, we've been able to do that, minus one wall. More on that soon!
The historical information about plaster for this post came from the following:
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4161
https://www.marekbros.com/sites/marekbros.com/files/plaster-assemblies-chapter-01-history-of-lath-and-plaster.pdf
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