The first stage of the repairs in the house wasn't quite in the "repair" category. Indeed, most of the work implied getting raw plaster on the walls and ceilings, removing carpet from the floor, and so on. This task kept us busy from July to October 2009. Since it would be boring to present that kind of activities everywhere in the house, I'll present a few emblematic spots.
The hall is a good example of what we had to face in most rooms on the ground floor.
The wallpaper is quite easy to get rid of, but there's something much, much worse : polystyrene tiles glued on all ceilings. Not only they are quite difficult to remove because of the position you have to be in in order to remove them, but you usually leave pieces of skin on the ceiling and end up bleeding after a few hours. Last but not least, it is impossible to remove the glue without removing pieces of plaster from the ceiling. In the end, we have ceilings which look like fields of round holes.
We ended up with:
- on the one hand somewhat "correct" walls and ceiling, if you ignore the holes which will have to be filled
- plenty of junk which we had to bring to the waste collection centre on a regular basis. We were going there so often that the employees were almost on a first name basis with us !
Another rather interesting place was the living and dining rooms. If you remember the pictures from the origins, these rooms not only had the wonderful polystyrene tiles on the ceiling but also panelling on the walls. Manu had great fun removing them and... the glue...The work in progress provides a wonderful idea of the extent of the issue.
In the end, this allowed us to reach that kind of stage:
Last but not least, the "situation" on the first floor... We had:
- The ever-present polystyrene tiles on the ceilings, of course, which were impossible to unglue without removing part of the paper of the drywalls,
- Moquette on the floors. These went off easily, even if part of them were hidden under a floating floor.
- Moquette on the walls. That was the real pain because some kind of paper layer remained glued on the drywalls and it was awful to unglue it.
For instance, we went through that kind of stage regarding the corridor on the first floor:
... or in one of the bedrooms:
And with much effort, we managed to reach these almost final conditions:
- In the corridor
- In the bedroom:
To be honest it was quite a depressing activity: indeed we were destroying what was somewhat decent in order to reach the raw skeleton of the house. However things would soon improve, which I will explain in a later post.
