Stairway Facelift

I have a couple of weeks off in between jobs, so I decided to take some time to do some facelifts in the house. My house project budget is pretty well shot since I spent $9,000 putting a new roof on and re-grading along the side of the house that kept flooding last year. But I was tired of the ugly route all of my guests were taking from the main floor to the basement guest bedroom. So I hired a handyman to come put up drywall on the closet near the guest room entrance and to patch the drywall behind the paneling in the stairway that I planned to tear down.

I started tearing down the paneling on Tuesday. I realized after a few chunks were down that I was dealing with plaster walls, not drywall. And it was very crumbly stuff. Here are some of the before pictures.

And here are some mid-way pictures. All of the paneling is now down. You can see the big pockmarks everywhere there had been a finishing nail. It was such a mess. Handyman Thomas and I decided it didn't make a lot of sense to patch all these crumbly holes, so he decided to cover the whole deal with sheetrock.

In theory, covering the whole deal with sheetrock seemed like a good idea. The plaster was so crumbly, I didn't want to have to worry every time I walked through there that I might knock a chunk out. But when Handyman Thomas started hanging the sheetrock, he had a heck of a time finding studs to attach it to. Apparently the plaster was so thick his studfinder was rendered useless. So he decided to supplement his "wing and a prayer' drywall screws with "liquid nails" glue.

Things are looking okay so far, but I'm totally having nightmares that the plaster is going to crumble under the weight of the sheetrock that's basically held up by glue, and that the entire thing is going to collapse. Here's hoping it holds at least as long as we live here!