Thursday, April 30, 2015

New Walls - Drywall Up and Painted - One Year Later

It's been a busy year in Eureka, but I've been slow to post updates. Today I am talking about new drywall over old messy walls and working to make the most from original molding throughout the house. The Eureka house, made from tons and tons of old growth redwood, has interior walls with wide planks attached over 2X4 studs. There were many layers of wall paper, some that fell off the walls and some that was permanently glued to rough redwood planks. We scrapped dumpsters full of old smelly wall paper from the house. Once we had as much paper off as possible we decided to re-cover the walls with drywall. Without removing molding the drywall masters used mostly ¼ inch drywall on the walls – and went either 3/8" or ½" on ceilings.
Leaving the molding in place protected the lovely old molding – but I'm sure it make fitting the drywall more difficult. The bottom molding was trimmed back a ¼" to make a smooth connection between the walls and the base molding.
This was a huge job, but a crew was in and out in a couple of days. The taping and sanding took several weeks, but finished up beautifully. Once the taping and sanding was done we put a finish on all the walls with Tuff-Hide primer-surface applied with rollers. We put on 50 or 60 gallons of the tough hide on, which provided both a final smooth coast as well as the primer base.
We had help with the tough-hide from friends who were paid off with hearty meals. You've seen Dave before in this project. We finished the tough-hide over the July 4th weekend.
With walls covered – all that was left was picking paints and getting it done --- Most of the painting got finished up over a long Christmas Holiday.