The pictures show a nice, if dated, interior façade. We had it painted when we moved in as the whole wall was a nasty Off - Navajo - Eggshell -Taupe color. It turned out to be semi Gloss white with nasty Off - Navajo - Eggshell -Taupe mortar. A great improvement and livable for a rental place. What you can't see clearly is how badly the bricks were glued onto the wall. From the wavy lines, to the splattered stickum, to the utter lack of pattern matching I suspect at least 100 proof alcohol was involved.
The bricks came off easily - once I got the right tool. That turned out to be a 7" mini pry bar - a Vorpal blade for façade bricks. Snicker snack!
Some of the bricks however, clung on for dear life thanks to more layers of paint than I could count. There were some . . . creative. . . color choices. These (most) bricks remained attached and hinged out from the wall when struck along 1 edge.
Removal of the façade created large gouges and removed most of the finish coat of plaster leaving a rough surface. (and 1 trapped leaf)
I'm in favor of a slightly rough finish as this wall will hopefully be gone in a few years (Later) but this was too much. A great deal of plaster of paris later the wall texture improved significantly.
It should be noted that this is not the perfect finish. All the renovation information I have found indicated that Plaster of Paris was not the correct type of plaster. HOWEVER given the expected lifespan of the wall, hardness, speed of drying, and most importantly ease of procurement, I expect it will function quite well. If it doesn't, I'll update y'all.
Here you see the original door frame into the kitchen. It was designed for a swinging door, long gone. It was claustrophobic. As anyone knows, when something makes you claustrophobic, beat on it until it goes away.
We refined this idea a bit and ripped out just the non-structural part of the door frame into the kitchen. For all my complaints about the quality of workmanship in the framing of the house, I have no fear that it will fall down. These guys used three doors worth of nails to secure this frame into place. Thank God for quality wrecking bars.
We gained 3-4 inches in width and 6" or so in height by stripping the wood out and re-framing the top inline with the doorway into the living room. As a good Seip, I shun new materials when I've just ripped perfectly good ones out of the wall. So the new frame is made up of pieces of the old one.
Speaking of which, here are some never-before-seen photos of the secret Seip ceremony: The Cleansing of The Lumber. Before any lumber may be reincarnated as scaffolding, forms, door frames, or say a staircase, it must be purified with hammers, wrecking bars, and cat's paws. Here is a picture of the pre-ritual staging area, and the cute acolyte cleaning up after the ceremony (for those of you from Beverly Hills, nails and such had to be removed from the scavenged lumber).
The new construction in the kitchen required drywall and plaster over it. This stage has not yet been completed. Partially because the plaster was 3/4" thick and the drywall only 1/2". I'm unsure if this 1/4" gap should be leveled out with plaster, patched with 1/4" drywall (I don't want to buy a sheet of mostly useless drywall) or sloped to meet the corner. I'm leaning toward sloping it, mostly again due to the expected lifespan of the wall. More to follow here.
Not even begun yet. Someday soon the livingroom especially will be ready to paint. Hmm. I keep trying to spell "paint" without the "t." I guess it's a good thing Stacy will be doing most of the painting....
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