R.I.P.

Our drill died.


Butter's mourning its demise because she and this drill have a bit of a history together...

Mr. Drill had a good life, he was the resident drill of the Crafts Students League (CSL) in Manhattan, where Butter worked. Well when the CSL was closed after 75 years as a craft school, the drill needed a new home and it was given to me by the ceramics department. Mr. Drill you were the best and will be missed.

... but mostly we're bothered because this leaves us a bit, um, screwed -- or rather, unscrewed. (Sorry -- I could not resist... I positively love corny puns.)
A new drill is not exactly in the budget, but we neeeeeeeeed it. (shelves to hang! plaster buttons to affix! furniture to repair! cabinets to install!) I guess this is one of those things that you hear grown-ups grumble about when they curse being homeowners.

Speaking of the curse, Mr. P. Lumbing came to visit last night and he was dripping mad.

Getting Messy

We've got lots of projects underway. We're getting dirty and creating quite a mess -- but all in the process of cleaning up.

Thanks to Uncle Joe, Aunt Rita, Momma and Poppa Thread, Momma Butter and Andy who all came out this weekend to whip the royal into shape!

Poppa Thread was all about "I'm here to work rah rah" and he got the kitchen whipped into shape with a coat a primer, and bead after bead of caulk. Momma Thread cleaned! Boy can she clean, now we have a place to unpack all of our kitchen boxes!

Uncle Joe, installed some shelves into the downstairs closet that had the wackiest measurements! No right angles at the Royal! Aunt Rita and Butter attacked the upstairs bathroom, no more linoleum. But now Butter knows what she needs to do next week....replace a wax seal on the toilet (eeeek!!!) And finally all of the wallpaper; ceiling and all is off the walls in Threads room. Andy installed a shelf in the closet room above the clothes bar. And Momma Butter fresh off a flight from Dar es Salaam, made us lunch. And finally at the end of the day the mirror for the closet room got a fresh coat of paint.

Long Weekend

Thank you Mr. Presidents! We had a nice long weekend to get a ton of work done. Stay tuned for pictures and lots of exciting things! One room is almost finished!, We bought a dragon, and he is very helpful...

Plaster buttons...

...are amazing, and elusive. Apparently they are the bees' knees when it comes to repairing old plaster walls. The Royal still has all of its original horse hair and plaster walls with the exception of the bathrooms.

Remember the ceiling Butter was afraid might fall down on her?


Well we got back to The Royal on Saturday and it was still in place, but the plaster did need to be re-secured to the lath or stud behind the surface.
Last Saturday night we walked into the local Home Depot (which we like to call "d'po") with a list a mile long, but what we were most anxious to get were these plaster buttons, or washers, that our contractor friends and dads had been telling us about and that we then read up on. We figured it would be easy -- there are a LOT of houses as old as ours in the area, so we figured everyone knew about these things. It seems we were wrong, or we were asking the wrong people. We had plenty of men in d'po looking at and talking to us like we were silly little city girls who had no idea what we were talking about. The same thing happened at the local hardware store. Butter was beginning to think that they were made up, so she went back to the information super highway and googled "plaster buttons" and the first place they popped up was at a hardware store in Philadelphia -- one neighborhood over from where her mom lives. Mama Butter scooped them up and brought them to us on Saturday morning.


These little washer things full of holes are miracle workers! They pulled the loose plaster to the lath and secured the walls -- genius! Spackling over them was a cinch and now the ceiling is good to go -- no more fear of a Chicken Little falling sky.

We have lots of places to use these throughout the house -- many areas where the plaster is pulling away from the lath. But these plaster washers are the way to go -- they're saving us a ton of money and time, allowing us to keep the plaster walls and not have to go through the process of tearing out the plaster and replacing it with drywall. Yeah!

lesson #1 -- wallpaper removal

wallpaper, oh wallpaper, come off those walls! well, we have A LOT of wallpaper - not only on the walls, but on the ceilings, too - maybe two-three-eight layers! this is bringing back memories for butter -- when she was a kid the family moved into an old house in philadelphia that had a lot of wall paper, paneling over said wallpaper, and a bullet lodged into the french doors. (she loved that detail!) but anyhow, momma insisted that all of the wallpaper be stripped before the family moved in....so off it came from both ceilings and walls. and then one night maybe a few days after they moved in, the ceiling came crashing down in butter's bedroom, giving the sleeping girls quite a start -- and giving grown up butter plenty of reason for caution this time around.




so after some research on the information super highway we've found that fabric softener and water is the way to go. experience this weekend has taught us that the water needs to be HOT HOT HOT and one needs to use LOTS of it. butter went in there double fisted -- two spray bottles blasting the walls like in an old western. then, after soaking the walls and waiting (waiting is the most important part)the scraping began, and off came the wall paper -- from both the walls and the ceilings.





the walls need one final scrub to remove the glue residue, some spackle, and some plaster buttons* to secure one part of the ceiling that butter left a piece of wall paper tacked on because we are pretty sure that part will probably be on the floor when we go back.

*plaster buttons! more on those later