a lot of things have to get worse before they get better. you pull all the stuff out of a messy closet, now you have an entire messy room. but then some stuff heads off to goodwill, and everything else goes back in, neater, and voila! better than when you started. (i say this like i ever actually clean out closets. i just move once every 2-3 years and purge as i’m packing. but i’ve HEARD that some people clean closets). as we dig deeper into the house renovation, we’ve begun asking each other, do you think THIS is the ugliest the house can get?
we sucked it up and decided to pay to have both apartments completely drywalled. i was sad to let the plaster walls go (covered up, actually), but we’re not really in the financial position to fix, or maintain, plaster long term. and while the house is old and charming, it’s not exactly a national registry treasure or anything. chicago is full of 110 year old greystones with sagging floors and cracked plaster walls. it was time to stop being so precious about it and figure out how to move forward.
but we did decide to be precious about the moulding. we can’t fix everything about this house right now (and what’s the point of a project house if you DID fix everything on the first round anyway?), but we’re trying not to sink money in things done cheaply that will have to be redone later. the contractor suggested that they leave all the window/door/baseboards in place and just install 1/2″ thick drywall up to the edges of the trim. but that means that the moulding wouldn’t have any depth against the new drywall surface. it would look like crap. i had imagined that we’d probably replace, or at least refinish, all the trim one room at a time over the next few years. while weighing our drywall vs. plaster decision, we dragged several friends who have renovated old houses over to consult on the issue. everyone told us the same thing: pry off the trim, drywall underneath it, then re-install the trim. sigh. we knew they were right. if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.
after dragging his heels for weeks, suddenly our contractor was all about getting his drywall crews in ASAP. so this past week ben and i spent 4 hours every night after work in the house tearing off all the trim. It’s beautiful old wood. oak, I think. 100 years old and still in great condition, if you can look past the 72 layers of gloppy paint all over it. every piece had to be pried off, then every nail pulled through (pounding them back out the way they came splinters the wood). each piece was coded in sharpie on the back side and corresponds to a map i drew (so in theory we can remember where it all goes).
it was not easy. we cursed. a lot. ben put a rusty nail through his thumb that landed him in urgent care 36 hours later when the infection set in (fear not, moms, he’s up to date on tetanus and fully antibioticked now). dinner became a parade of takeout and leftovers eaten hastily between prying off and stacking the trim. my inbox overfloweth with unanswered emails. the cats grew lonely and whiny because we were out every night. laundry and dishes piled up. but it also felt good to finally get in and start working on our house ourselves, rather than just sitting around waiting for the contractor to do stuff. we removed and salvaged literally thousands of linear feet of moulding. the 1st floor alone took 36-man hours. the second floor would have taken almost that had our contractor not gotten antsy and taken it down for us. (we still have to map and mark each piece and pry out all the nails).
the trim will have to be professionally stripped and sanded because there isn’t enough time, or dust masks, in the world for us to tackle that project ourselves. we’ll probably end up repainting it ourselves once it comes back clean. the trim in the rental unit will have to go back up before we can rent it, so its good that we have a deadline to keep us honest. the trim in our own apartment will have to go back up before we can have the house reappraised and refinanced, so that means we also have a motivating deadline there.
a few months ago a friend of ours was renovating his new [old] house in Pilsen and found a gun hidden in the walls. (he turned it over to the police). we did not find anything so exciting, or sordid. just this writing on the backside of one of the pieces of trim:
after busting our asses (and thumbs) for four days to get the trim down, we left down for 3 days (quick road trip to PA for a family wedding). we got back tonight, swung by the house, and lo! all the drywall had gone up and is awaiting taping/sanding. the leprosy is gone!
