Step 4: Sealant

The fourth, and last step (which is completed in two coats, actually) is a sealant over the clay.  This is recommended for rooms with high humidity or if you want a slight sheen to the wall.

Applying the sealant means mixing a 1:1 ratio of what appears to be a liquidy school glue and water, and spraying it on the wall with a houseplant mister, in overlapping circles.  Let it absorb for a few minutes, then blot any drips with a sponge.

Let it all dry for a couple hours, and then repeat, and then let cure for 72 hours before working on the wall again.

We finished the second coat early on Friday, so the walls could cure over the weekend.

Step 3: To impress, you must compress!

(Same corner as last night. Different tools. Different muscles.)

The instructions are headed with the title ("To impress, you must compress!" I think it would be more memorable if it were, "To make an impression, you must use compression!" But they didn't ask me).  Step 3, after letting the second coat of clay dry, is to lightly press the wall, using a very well-squeezed sponge, in overlapping circles.  More good upper body workout here.  The Texan and I recited, "Wax On. Wax Off" as we worked.  Tonight's step only took an hour though, and that felt like a great reprieve after about 53 woman-hours of work in the last 7 days (counting priming, too).

We think we did it right.  I can't figure out how rubbing an almost dry sponge against a wall will "harden and compact the clay" as the instructions claim -- but we did notice there was a slight sparkle in the clay as we finished. A sparkle that is visible in our demo swatch, but hasn't been in the pistachio goop we've slammed on the walls.

One more step tomorrow.

American Clay Coat 2 - Who needs a Gym?

Last night -- well, Monday night for The Texan, and yesterday afternoon into night for me (and her for her second evening) -- we applied the second coat of plaster.  You can see the slightly pained look in my eyes -- although I didn't feel pain at that moment, which was about 9:45 p.m.  This morning, however, my right hand in particular is swollen, cramped up from the hours and hours of holding the trowel and dragging.

But it's up, and no more troweling! Yay!

Plaster thick, Some will stick

(Not even half done, but isn't it pretty? The white spaces will be left as is -- they're behind cabinets, so we didn't plaster those spaces.)

This weekend we put American Clay on the walls. Thirty-four "woman"-hours of work, not counting the primer, which we finished Friday night.  That's the first coat done -- only three more steps to go.

It is actually not hard to do, and (if you have good tunes to listen to, or in my case, podcasts from The Popcorn Dialogues, Kermode and Mayo movie reviews, and WNYC's RadioLab) not all that tedious.  The plaster is forgiving of mistakes, and the look is intended to be organic.

Mixing it took an hour and a half, alone. You start by pouring half a 50 pound bag of flour-like plaster into a couple gallons of water. Separately, you mix the color -- a one-pound bag of colored powder -- into water, and then pour that into the clay.  Then you work another 25 pounds of plaster dust into the mix, using a drill with a mixing head on it, slowly so as not to create lumps, until it "forms the consistency of pudding". I know how to mix a wedding cake now -- as long as it's pistachio.

Then, slap the pudding-goop on the wall and spread it around.  As I said, it was tedious more than difficult, and simply took forever.  We had to change our plans on the fly as to what is to be plastered -- we had intended the ceiling of the long entrance way to be clay as well, but there simply wasn't enough (and the stuff is expensive enough that we didn't want to buy a third bag, to use about an eighth of it for that one space.

That was the first coat.  The second coat is more of the same, except we hope that this time we'll be more experienced (i.e., faster).  Third coat is actually just a damp sponge and pressing, which we really really hope is faster -- just a matter of climbing up and down the ladders. And lastly, the sealant -- sprayed on lightly with a mister bottle, and left to cure for three days.  We are hoping to have the contractors back in a week from today to start installing the cabinetry, so we have to get the walls completely done by Friday night.  It will be a busy week.

Contractors - Wham! Bam! Thank you, Ma'am!

To heck with having an exploded kitchen -- we've hired contractors to mostly finish the work.  By "we" I mean The Texan, who did the legwork. I just showed them around for bids, and then have been letting them into the house for work.

The last straw was the day after HomoDommi returned home from his latest visit, when we all realized that -- due to school functions, having to move houses (their rental expired), and summer school (not to mention recovery from the sheer exhaustion after the last working visit) -- he would not be able to get back to Portland for any reason until late June at the earliest. And then he would only be able to stay a few days, and would have children with him. We at Cattus Dommus Prime would love to see the children, but their presence would not be conducive to dawn-to-dusk work on the house. We couldn't stand the thought of 6 weeks of no-progress, followed by a mere couple of half days' work, followed by more long weeks of stalemate.

So contractors it is.  The Texan chose someone who bills himself as an "All Around HandyMan", which allows us much flexibility -- and it's already proved useful.  I'll call him "Marvellus" -- a rotund man with shiny white hair who reminds me of a generic character actor from a screwball comedy -- and his sidekick, "Gricolus" -- a wiry, pepper-bearded short man who moves quickly and constantly, who, if anything, reminds me of the generic town-drunk sidekick in a singing western (without any hint of the drunk part). (Click here for more fun with Roman names.)  Gricolus's high-school-aged son "Tertus" is working too. A summer job that comes with long-term career experience.

HomoDommi does good work -- our new Handymen have not done anything better than he could have.  They are faster though (and there are three of them, two of which have a combined 75 years of experience), and not worse. They've worked four partial days so far, and in that time have sheetrocked (and double-mudded) the remainder of the room and ceiling, and built a broom closet.  They fixed a bunch of mistakes in the mudding of the walls that I did, too. The space feels more solid now, less echoey, although it's still wide open.

The next step is up to us. We are priming the sheetrock -- putting plain old drywall primer behind all the cabinets, and special "toothed" primer everywhere else, even the ceiling. By "toothed", I mean, environmentally green gluish-paint-substance-with-tons-of-sand-in-it.  

This coming weekend, we will plaster all these toothed surfaces with American Clay, a textured plaster that gives a hand-crafted, earthy feel to the walls.  By "we", I mean, me, and The Texan.  The How-to DVD that comes with the bag assures us it is easy to apply, while recommending we hire professionals.  The Texan and HomoDommi have used it before (on the downstairs bathroom, for anyone who's been to the house) -- and assure me it is nowhere near as straightforward as implied.  They both seem to think the kitchen will be easier, however, because, "the bathroom -- that was two of us, in a small space, in 85 degree summer heat!"  

I look at the sheer volume of wall space we will be covering (about three times the size of the bathroom, and much of that is ceiling) and the forecast for this weekend (sun at last, with a steamy 83 high for both days), and I wonder about those professionals. Time to recharge my keen sense of humor, I see.

Weekend work, urr, non-work

[Updated version to correct text over-writing images. At least, I hope so. I also made a few textual edits to clarify some details.]

Saturday ended up being a day off, although we didn't plan it that way. HomoDommi invited me to his book club (which was quite pleasant) and then the household joined old friends for the evening, just to kibbutz.

On Sunday, we geared up for work and almost instantly were at a standstill.  This is what much of Sunday felt like.

That is, staring at a hole in the floor, scratching our heads, in more than a little exasperation.

The cause: the hole we made when we removed the chimney.  It's a nice, clean hole down into the basement, about 18" square. When it was filled with chimney, it was surrounded by drywall (in fact, we only removed the last remnant of the drywall last month during the deconstruction). When it was a chimney surrounded by drywall, contractors would use the small gaps to run wires and plumbing through.

Here is a photo, taken when we began this project 3 years ago.  It shows the chimney still in place in the kitchen (although the front wall of covering has been removed).

Next, the same view after getting rid of the bricks (and the ceiling except for the 2x4s).  You can see all those wires running through the gap behind the chimney, and, less obviously, a couple rigid, pale yellow pipes running up the near corner -- between the chimney and the (still-standing, in the photo) drywall. (I've talked about them before, in my list of infrastructure opportunities.)

I blogged about a ten days ago about the productive day HomoDommi and I had, moving the pipes that run up to the second floor -- some of that involved moving them from the front corner of the space shown back into the true wall, between the joists. And the electricians came in and wired the area for a light switch, and also ran wires through for the ceiling lights in the new kitchen.

In all this, we didn't realize that one wire -- one very fat, large wire -- hasn't been neatly tucked back into that between-joists frame.  You can see it in the two close-up photos.

This wire, which is taut, goes all the way up to the attic and provides most (if not all) of the lighting on the second floor. We need it to not be crossing out into the airspace in front of that hole.




Another issue is, how do you fill a hole?  I mean, solidly, so that a refrigerator can rest upon it (that's what the masking tape shows, the front of the fridge), and so that people might someday walk across it.  That is, without reflooring a massive area around the hole, and while adding a laundry chute to the area.

Still the day was not totally given over to frustration.  The Texan and I installed the second of the two concrete boards backing the sink.  And we picked out a window to install over the sink in that wall (as shown).