In 2023 (!!!!!), while I was in Utah with Field Biology, Brooke started to peel wallpaper upstairs on the landing. The last bit of wallpaper that we wanted to remove was the living room downstairs, but in order to do that, we had to do the upstairs and the stairwell, since it was all one continuous sheet. Of course, this was a daunting and disruptive task, so we hoped we could kinda take care of it “piecemeal,” and to a degree, we did. She took down the wallpaper upstairs and I primed the walls before our Alaska trip last Summer (…that I never posted about, apparently…whoops!).
After that, we got busy, school happened, band camp, robotics…you know, the usual “life” stuff that happens when you have a 12- and 16-year-old in the house. Fast forward to January and we decide “okay, this needs to happen.” But, we had talked for years about doing the ceilings simultaneously with the walls. If we could find someone who would put something up to cover the hole in the ceiling (pictured above) that had been there since before we moved into the house, and also deal with the wallpaper-covered plaster ceilings that had cracks in them, then the trim could come down at the same time and we could deal with the walls.
Brooke saw a sign for a guy in town and started a text exchange. We got an estimate, talked timelines, and decided to go for it. We’d tried for years to get an estimate on the ceiling(s) and no one would ever come through, but this guy finally did.
So on January 6th, while I was on Christmas Break, I started on the wallpaper on the stairwell. Brooke and I finished it about a month later, since I wanted an adult to be home to hold the ladder while the other adult could get the wallpaper in the upper left portion that was hard to reach. After the stairwell was taken care of, Brooke could then work on patching the worst bits of plaster.
The weird thing was that there was only one layer of wallpaper on these walls! There were multiple layers in the music room and upstairs on the landing, but once I started on the stairwell, only one layer.
More time went on as Brooke plastered here and there. We also had to clear off the landing and start moving things to the garage and the attic of the house. To make this all work, we effectively had to move everything out of the spaces that were getting the new drywall ceilings, so what we decided to do was move everything off the landing and do our bedroom first.
It should be noted that, we really do mean everything had to be moved out, so it took time to pack the house attic as full as we could with furniture, and we also took things out to the garage. My car is the one that routinely has its own dedicated bay, so for about a month or so, my car stayed in the driveway while my bay was taken up by bed frames, dressers, end tables, and other things.
By February, the stairwell was dewallpapered and Brooke was busy working on the plastering. The plan was to start the upstairs bedrooms in early March, so this time period mostly just featured limited disruption and consistent movement of furniture and other things to the attic and garage. There were a few days we had available to move large chunks of items, but it was basically “carry a box out that you know you won’t need for awhile.”
It wasn’t really until late March that we dewallpapered the main floor, necessitating the movement of the rugs, couches, TV, etc. into other spaces. The music room became the the living room on March 28, giving us at least some space to live in for most evenings. It was also around that time that I was given a roommate in the form of Meg, who moved down to the dining room. Her bed and box springs were brought downstairs, the table was moved against the wall, and for about a week and change, she slept down there. I’d stay up later than she wanted watching TV (though I was quiet…….), but it wore on her pretty quickly.
This, of course, had to happen because there could be nothing in our bedroom or on the landing while the contractors put up the new drywall ceilings. They would put the ceiling up, do some mudding around the seams, sand, mud, sand, mud, etc. The ceilings themselves were up pretty quickly, but the mudding process took days. For the most part, they would put up ceilings on the landing, move all their equipment into our bedroom, then the next day, they’d put up ceilings in our bedroom while they mudded and sanded the landing. Then, they’d hit the bedroom ceiling and return to the landing for crown molding, and so on. It was about a week and a half for them to do the ceilings on the landing and the crown molding, and put the ceiling fans back into place.
Of course, any time they needed to mess with anything electrical, I’d have to go down to the basement to cut power before I went to work. The cats were kept in the basement any time the workers were here to keep them out of the way, so there was no access to the circuit breaker unless I took care of it.
The fact they got the drywall put up so quickly above the stairwell is still probably the most impressive feat to me. They had some equipment to hold up drywall sheets, but again, the height of the space and the lack of flat surface for said equipment to sit on is still crazy to me… Again though, the biggest deal was getting the crown molding up in those spaces, and making it seem mostly level with the house. On the landing, the workers had to add an extra board along one of the walls to make sure the ceiling ended up level with the world, but not with the house. The house had settled over decades, and the ceiling was “bowed” on the landing (very, very noticeably…), so there was more to do than just put drywall up.
After that was all done, it was time to switch everything up so they could do the kids’ bedrooms, but that’s a story for another post!