Lest you think I’ve been twiddling my thumbs since returning from our Portland get-away, I can assure you hours have been spent mudding, sanding, wiping, cleaning and repeat. Thing is, it just doesn’t look that different from one time to the next, unless you look more closely. So 4 days of almost identical photos doesn’t seem very interesting. But now it’s getting hard to tell the filler from the project, so it’s time for a neutralizing coat of primer to help assess where I still need to do some filling.
But prior to that, it’s probably a smart time to first remove all the carpet. After all, it now holds several pounds of drywall dust, and obscures some of the trim that needs attention. So next up I’ll remove the flooring, and the antique heating duct and door hardware for stripping, and soon the door itself for its own cleaning up.

And that raises the question of flooring. How many layers of flooring would you guess I’ll find? One, three, five? I don’t know the answer yet, but here are two hints. First, I suspect the correct answer will be a fraction, as parts of the room feel completely different under foot, most likely because sometime in its history this room was a kitchen, and under the area where the cabinets used to be, the flooring is different. Two, I’ll stop removing layers as soon as I have a solid and fairly consistent layer on which to lay laminate. I don’t feel the need to go all the way down to shiplap, unless that is the only option.

So what are your guesses? All winning entries are welcome to stop in for a free latte or cortado, and to join in on an upcoming painting day.

Our train’s scheduled 3:00 pm departure meant we had time to explore the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, including a lovely lunch and tea in the tea room. Then after a short departure delay, onto the train heading back to Vancouver. It’s a grey travel day, and shortly after Seattle the darkness has settled in. We are scheduled to arrive in Vancouver at 11:30 pm, and our home for the night is just a few blocks away from the train station.

We had planned for today to be a little less energetic, spending time in the neighbourhoods in walking distance to our home. The fact that it was occasionally drizzling helped to confirm our quieter day. According to locals we’ve chatted with, winter and spring are all about flowers in Portland, and we are quite taken by them. In our few days here the Magnolia trees have gone from plump buds to monstrous flowers. I’ll try to keep the food references to one photo today.

Today was a cloudier day in Portland, with the occasional shower during the afternoon, but nothing that changed or interfered with our festivities. Believe it not we managed to find another wonderful coffee shop or two, and we got to walk across the Willamette River (we used a bridge) and along the river park, just like we like to do in Saskatoon. The springtime colours are very present and lovely. We grabbed some ridiculous donuts from Voodoo Donuts (see the video below). And we spent a few hours in a massive book store (Eileen may have spent more time inside the store than Les) and then managed to find a little gem of a small pub/restaurant near our BnB, serving up a wide range of local beers and food, from cheeses to oysters and other yummy delights. Even the bathroom here has some surprises (see second video).

I’m realizing I may not post the most representative photos of my life or our adventures here, but hey, you get what you paid for. So here are some tidbits from today.

We woke up at a spritely 5:00 am, walked over to the train station and proceeded down the coast to Portland. The train had an old but modern feel, and was fairy comfortable. Since trains tend to follow shorelines and rivers (to keep the up/down inclines to a minimum) we got to see lots of lovely scenery along the way. See the two videos below the gallery of pics for some outside pictures. And because we are food nerds and like to try new things, we went for a seafood dinner. A brief description accompanies photos of two of the courses.

After WestJet used lime green deicer in Calgary, I got to Vancouver, found Eileen, had sushi for lunch, and we wandered the streets of Gastown and Chinatown until we found out night’s lodging. Then we walked to a beer market for supper, and spotted the train station we will be at for 5:30am.

I only had a few evening this past week to work on the project, and it seems it doesn’t look that different one day to the next once it’s about mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, and so on. So here are a few updated pics. I’m guessing one more sanding/mudding/sanding and it should be ready for priming, which may reveal a few more spots to touch up. Then it will be time to start ripping out the floor(s).

On a related note, this project is going to take a little break, while I take a little break. I suspect you’ll see some pics showing up here from Vancouver, a train ride, and from Portland. The reno project will resume only when I return, unless my house watcher chooses to do some drywall mudding in my absence, which would be ridiculous.

I forgot to post yesterday.
From time to time one just needs to clean up the mess and re-evaluate the progress. I will still have some more scraping and repair work to do, but to get a good sense of where I am, I’ve shoveled the floor and wiped down the ceiling and walls twice. One photo shows a close up of the kind of damage I’ll be mudding later. Later when I went back into the room with a flashlight to examine the walls inside the closet, I realized how much fine dust I had stirred up during my cleaning, so I took a picture of that too, just because it looked really cool. In the last photo you’ll see I’ve added a couple of hunks of gyproc into a few of the biggest spaces where I removed plaster. This let’s me use far less plaster and speeds up the repair of these large areas. You might think that I’m really bad at measuring and cutting drywall, but in fact I’m trying to leave enough space between the gyproc and the original plaster both so that I can key in the plaster that I’ll be adding, and in order to feather between varying wall thicknesses (remember, there’s nothing flat in 107 year old houses). The plaster I’ll be using is very different from drywall mud, primarily because it has fibreglass in it to create a very strong product when it hardens, even in applications of 1/2″ or thicker over wide areas, which would be problematic with drywall mud.

Before our roof was done with proper shingles and protection against ice dams, water got into the ceiling/wall spaces, generally where two rooflines met. This water from the outside softened and weakened the plaster itself, which you can see in the closet as the plaster just crumbled away once I gave it a little encouragement. Repairing this kind of plaster I quite enjoy. It’s big and goopy and you see a big difference right away. It’s like sculpting.

The second picture shows damage more on the surface, and at least some of that damage is likely from running a vaporizer inside a closed bedroom for extended periods of time. Oops! We were just trying to tend to a young kid with a bad cough. Repairing this kind of damage with endless, tedious scraping, then applying drywall mud, then sanding, then wiping, and then repeat, etc., that I’m not so keen on!

Next up, washing down the dusty de-stippled ceiling and starting the chipping and scraping and prepping. O, and some floor cleanup.