Take Time for Repairs

Saturdays remind me of working old houses. We spent enough weekends doing that in our younger days. For some reason, we decided to be exacting on the inside of our little cottage. That required time, patience, and a skill that came with practice, but the greatest of these was time.

That’s why Bob and Maria made us feel so bad. They didn’t take much time at all. They would swoop in, buy one of the historic homes, spend a month on it, and have it ready to sell. That made us feel like a couple of losers. What were we doing wrong that our progress was so slow?

Maybe we were being too careful. We decided, for example, to keep the plaster intact or fix it best we could whenever we could. Replacing it with sheetrock was a pain in the rear. There was a finish layer of plaster, a base layer of plaster, wooden lathes to which the plaster clung, and two by fours that were really two by four. It was hard to make sheetrock a seamless fit. We tried to save as much plaster as we could, but in a few spots, we had no choice.

I wish we could have filmed our little method of putting four by eight slabs of sheetrock on the ceiling, though. I can’t remember exactly how we did it, but it involved a homemade t-support made of two by fours, a tall ladder, and a pith helmet. I found that I could press said helmet onto the sheet while the brace held one end, my young wife held the middle, and I got in a few nails. Jeez.

Anyway, while we were sheet-rocking a ceiling, taping and securing sagging plaster, or breathing the dust of such labors, Bob and Maria (not their real names) would renovate an entire house, sell it, and buy another. People would look at us. Their mouths would not speak. Their eyes, however, would scream, “What’s taking you two so friggin’ long?” We would patch a spot of spalling plaster and smile.

What’s spalling, you ask? Spalling — sometimes incorrectly called spaulding or spalding — is the result of moisture entering the plaster. It forces the surface to peel, pop out, or flake off. It's also known as flaking. It can be fixed fairly easily, but it takes time. How others did it so fast, we had no clue.

Until, that is, we were invited to one of Bob and Maria’s “House Finished” parties. Their secrets for historic preservation on the fast track were revealed to us. Does the term, “half-assed” mean anything to you, as in “half-assed historic preservation?”

I’ll swear there were places where plaster sagged from the ceiling under a fresh coat paint, the designer colors attracting attention away from the lack of basic repairs.

Spalling? They didn’t mind no stinkin’ spalling. A super thick coat of latex paint covered it over to all but eyes that had spent hours skimming and sanding a bad spot so nobody would know it was there.

I still wonder how the buyers of those houses felt when the butcher’s bill came it. Did the sound of a chunk of plaster falling from a ceiling terrify them at night? What happened at locations where receptacle boxes had been placed in holes ripped open with reciprocating saws? Those left plaster lathes unsupported and the plaster “keys” that were to extend through the lathes and hold the plaster in place lying on the floor of the wall cavity.

Who will ever know? Bob and Maria left town after half a dozen of their highly-lauded renovations, their reputations as master builders still intact. I think their legendary status remains in the minds of some folks to this day.

Meantime, we patched, sanded, skimmed, sanded again, primed, painted and cussed. We got good at it all, especially the cussing.            

This won't take long, not long at all.