Weekend #8 got an early start with Pap taking the trim off the wall in the dining room and removing the trim around the door to Denny's room. We made the decision to rebuild the wall in the dining room where the coal stove used to be. The wall was in pretty poor condition, so skim coating it wasn't really an option. We also needed to deal with the awkward breaker box. Below are a couple of 'before' pictures to give you an idea of what we were working with.
We had previously attempted to take the wallpaper off. As you can see in the picture above, it was challenging because there were also large places of paint on plaster and some sort of concrete mix. Part of the wall is brick that has been covered. The breaker box is in the corner and had a tiny crevice built into the corner that needed to be closed off just for the sake of aesthetics. The breaker box itself needed to be centered in the frame, so we decided to just clean up the whole thing by hanging sheet rock.
On Thursday and Friday, Pap began prepping the areas by taking off the trim and prepping the wall for the sheet rock. Photo credits to Nan! I'm grateful she is willing to take progress pictures when we are not there.
He also took the trim off the door to Dennys bedroom. We decided to hang sheet rock on this wall as well with the goal of leveling it up. You can see how crooked the door was in the second picture below.
I insisted on 'delicate demo' (thank you Erin Napier) so the trim could be put back after the new wall was installed. So that meant we ended up with a pile of trim with nails in the dining room floor to work around.
Scott and I arrived on Saturday. The biggest item on the to-do list for the weekend was getting the new wall up. The wall was mostly Pap's project, with a little assistance from the work team. Scott and I started the finish coat of the skim coat on the walls.
Removing the trim did show off some of the brick chimney that runs behind this wall. The chimney is shared (I think) with the fireplace in the bedroom. This led to a lengthy discussion where my Dad and Scott successfully convinced me not to tear out the plaster and have an exposed brick wall in the dining room. See the exposed brick below. It took them a few minutes to convince me not to show off this brick.
I finally agreed to move forward with the sheetrock wall after I realized the chimney is shouldered behind this wall, so it wouldn't have been brick to the ceiling all the way to the corner.
Just a few feet in from the left side of this wall is a cover plate for the pipe from the old coal stove. As we have worked on the house, we have decided it was definitely built prior to 1935 as listed on the tax records. Some of the old paperwork we have indicates it may have been built as early as 1908. We are fairly certain the house was built without indoor plumbing. We believe the back portion of the house was added when the plumbing was brought inside. The room pictured above would have actually served as a dining room/kitchen with the coal stove. The coal stove likely was used for cooking and heating, and possibly laundry. The door to the kitchen on the right of the picture above was probably the back door to the house.
The stove pipe emptied into the brick chimney through the hole seen below. In the picture below, Scott was sealing the hole so we could hang sheet rock over it.
The hole was covered with the plate pictured below. I spent my entire life thinking this was a paper plate glued to the wall at Mamaw's house. It is actually called a flue cover plate or a flue stop. It is a metal plate designed specifically to cover flue holes like this one. Scott pried it off the wall and soot dumped out, down the wall and on the floor.
You can see the brick of the chimney in these photos. The chimney actually comes from the basement, where there is a coal furnace. It is still there today. I will try to remember to take some pictures and share them here.
The hole was sealed up and the sheetrock went up over it. Goodbye, flue hole!
We had also made the decision to sheet rock the wall around the door to the bedroom to help get the door frame shored up. They were able to get all the sheetrock hung before the weekend was over.
In the meantime, Scott and I were working on the finish coat of skimming. The finish coat is a thinner mixture of the joint compound we used for the scratch coat. It is basically a second coat over everything we had already done.
Skim coating is pretty physically demanding, exhausting work. The finish coat is supposed to be the smooth finish, filling in the rough spots of the scratch coat and smoothing it out, so it requires you to work with the compound a bit as you put it on the wall. By this time, we were feeling pretty good about our skim coating abilities, even if it is a bit messy. There are lots of YouTube videos and step-by-step tutorials on how to skim coat in 15 minutes or less, but I am 100% certain good skim coating takes time and patience.
On Sunday, we had run out of skim coat mixture and I didn't want to mix up anymore, so I switched over to priming the ceilings to prepare for the next weekend.
I managed to get all the ceilings primed, even though my arms were already spent and I was completely over working above my head. I was grateful to have it done, though.
It was an incredibly productive weekend. I am so grateful for Nan and Pap and their help with the house. I will close out this post with the weekend work crew picture for Weekend #8! 💜
References for today's post:
https://www.oldhouseonline.com/kitchens-and-baths-articles/kitchen-appliances/history-of-the-kitchen-stove/
https://www.monroecopost.com/news/20200409/from-historian-coal-furnaces-and-ash-piles
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