Removing slats from walls and removing bedroom ceilings

The plaster said the dreaded words: "Mate, the slats have to come down". Here are some progress pictures.

These are both taken from the middle bedroom looking into the study.



Here is the pile we removed. This is only about 2/3 of them.



Our original intention was to leave the front & middle bedrooms' ceilings in place and just sheet over them. However when I was up on the ladder I noticed they were sagging pretty badly, so we decided to pull them down. What a mess!

This is from the study looking into the middle bedroom.

Lupin home after Christmas

Lupin arrived home from the kennels at 5:45am today smelling of flea treatment, and was fast asleep by 6:45am. I managed to wait until 3pm before stroking his velvet ears. Here he is playing with the toy that P & G gave him for Christmas.

The false ceilings come down

Excluding jobs that relate to raw sewage, I now believe there are no jobs more filthy than removing a ceiling. We pulled the false ones down from the hall and study and then had to remove all of the original plaster from the original ceilings. So I suppose that the dust that was disturbed is from the last 100-odd years or whatever.

Unfortunately the photos don't really do it justice because the difference, particularly in the hallway, is quite dramatic.

First of all the hallway before...



And after...



The study before (pictured is the false ceiling's frame)...



And after...

New switchboard and power-points

Some good news at last! We don't need to rewire! But we did replace the switchboard and got a load of new power-points installed. The phone and television aerial are also wired into all rooms. These things are a bit too boring to bother with photos (even for me), but a picture of the old switchboard was worth including, albeit a rubbish one...

Rowena with some legs and ears

I couldn't find any reno context in which to put this...

Hidden treasures

When you do this sort of thing you do hope you'll find some interesting artefacts. We didn't find anything under the floors, but the walls had a couple of nice surprises. These were all in the study...





The pin-up girl was cut from a magazine and is dated 1957. We also found some newspaper dated September 1959 being used a draft-stopper. It's the sport section around footy finals time. We've taken these all off the walls and have them floating about in the kitchen in the hope that we'll spill something on them or the dog will eat them. On the off-chance that this doesn't happen, we'll get them framed.

Stripping off the internal wall cladding

The walls had on them a variety of cladding - pine panels, masonite and old larden plaster.

So we ripped it all off.

Here is the front room...



Here's the front room looking back. Yikes, that's the middle bedroom through there...


Speaking of which...



The hallway came up a treat. We need to pull the nails out next...goodbye nails, hello blisters!



The study was a different proposition altogether. It had a false ceiling, which for some reason was installed about a foot lower than the original. Of course it had to go...





We still need to poke through a load of the old plaster.