Bathroom-Before

When I bought my house, I was happy that it had a ceramic tiled bath. It was not original tile but it was a fairly clean, functional and solid bathroom. I loved the arched alcoves over the sink and tub and the built in medicine cabinet. I was not so happy about the little plywood cabinet holding up the sink or the beige vinyl floor. Also the original window had been replaced. The bathroom window is the only vinyl replacement window in the house, all the rest are original.

I had no idea how quickly the tile would began to fail. It starting falling off the walls almost immediately. The shower area crumbled apart in a matter of months. Redoing the bathroom got pushed to the top of the list.

There was an ugly lamp above the medicine cabinet and I took that out. There were shadows of previous sconces on each side of the cabinet, so I put in electrical boxes to reinstall those and installed a GFCI outlet

As I took the tile off the walls I found it had basically been glued and much of the plaster crumbled off around it. I ended up removing the lower portion of plaster. The plaster had a stamped pattern in it like that in the kitchen.

When I removed the toilet and the plaster behind it, I saw the vent stack had rusted through. There were holes in that cast iron pipe releasing oh lovely sewer gas smells into the walls. Had I not replaced the plaster, I might not have noticed this. I called in plumbers to replace the vent stack.

Here is the arch over the toilet. I had tried to save most of the plaster on the back wall but the plumbers destroyed it when they placed the new vent pipe.

So then I was in full demolition mode.

Beautiful.
There are no pictures but I used a putty knife and scraped all the paint of the plaster walls. The ease at which it came off the walls let me know that any new paint on top would be destined to fail. I scraped down to bare plaster. I patched many, many cracks and primed the walls. I began patching the ceiling but that was too difficult and hard on my neck so I decided to cover it with drywall.

More plaster repair

2 parts StructoLite to 1 part Diamond Veneer Finish makes a good scratch coat to repair the plaster that fell off the walls when the baseboards were removed in the living room.


I sprayed the old lath with water before applying the plaster. It is fairly easy to work with. Especially when I know it will be totally covered up.


This is an outside wall so repairing the plaster helps cut down on the drafts. It has been cold here.

I am so glad to be putting things together rather than tearing them apart. Still lots of trim to strip, though.

Plaster repair

I did some work in my dining room repairing several areas of plaster that needed attention. Here is an outlet that was poorly patched. Can you see the large divot? This outlet was in a bad location, is not wired to anything and there is another outlet on the same wall 2 feet away. I decided to close the hole entirely.
















There was also some failure of the plaster below the window due to some previous water leaking. I took the opportunity to open the space below the window enough to add insulation. The walls were insulated from the attic above and the areas below the windows had no insulation.
I removed lath and put loose cellulose into the wall then replace the lath. There is also an opening for a new outlet to be added one day.

The area pictured below had a poorly done drywall patch. I imagine it was due to the removal of a beautiful old cold air return that was replaced with a small ugly metal grate. Argghh. There is another opening on the other side of the wall and the grate is visible. I filled in the area with scrap lath.
I am using the "Worley method" of plaster of repair that I have read about on several housblogs. It is a three layer system using different mixtures of 2 types of plaster-- Structolite and Diamond Finish plaster. It was a bit of a challenge to work with but I finished the first two layers.
The other ongoing project is stripping the paint off all of the baseboard trim.