Repairing the walls

So one of my first goals was to get rid of the carpet. It had been there for at least 42 years because it’s in my baby pictures at that house. It was full of dust that would cause me to sneeze, wheeze, and just be miserable for a couple of days after leaving the house. The girls playing and removing the furniture just kicked up all the particles that wreaked havoc with my respiratory system.

Prep Work

But before the carpet could be pulled up, we wanted to do all the painting so if/when we spilled it wasn’t a big deal. In order to paint, we had to fill in ALL the nail holes. My grandma loved pictures and put a lot of them on the walls. Then there were the cracks in the plaster walls. Neither one of us had ever done anything like that before, so we researched how on YouTube and This Old House. Are we experts on this? I’ll let you know after a few years if our repairs have held. I will tell you we have gotten MUCH faster at slicking on the mud and sanding it. My favorite video for repair was this one. It was straight forward, simple and made it seem less daunting.

Just some of the many nail holes we filled.
The girls got in on the work, too. They did a great job! They really liked sanding it down after it dried, too.
This is a crack in the dining room. It had what I was referring to as a “sister” crack in the office. Basically the same size and same location on the opposite side of the wall. These two were probably the biggest cracks we worked on downstairs.
So you actually have to widen the cracks first which seems counterintuitive, but it allows for the mud to grab on to more area. I just used a box cutter and followed the path of the cracks. For areas that were slightly wider than you see here we used adhesive mesh tape and then a couple layers of mud on top (thoroughly drying and sanding between layers).
This is what it looks like after it’s had one layer of mud. We tried using plaster but it set too quickly for our expertise. We might be able to do it now since we’ve nearly done the whole house but this system seems to be working. Again, we’ll see how it looks in 5 years. I’m optimistic but won’t be terribly surprised if we find some cracks pop up again.

This process has taken a long time because of the drying times, multiple layers, sanding, and then the more we looked, the more cracks we found. But the walls look really good right now. I realized I don’t have a great final picture, so that will have to wait until we head back up there next weekend! 🙂