The ceiling has left the building As I predicted on
21 October the kitchen's plaster ceiling was removed during this week. Thursday afternoon actually.
My wife had been busily daubing stencilled vines on the internal timberwork of the back verandah, and being unable to contribute anything useful, I declared I was going to have a look at the cornice in the kitchen. Cornices are the angled bits where the ceiling and the walls meet. Their main purpose is to hide the poor job of fitting the plasterers did when the ceiling was originally installed.
I'm sure a lot of people don't realise just how lousy a job some plasterers do. There is tons of material up there defying the laws of gravity, stuck on the underside of the wooden joists more by good luck than anything else. If Australia was to receive a vertical jolt of a few inches then millions of tons of plaster would be released and kill half the population.
You may think I joke, but you obviously have been struck by a chunk of the stuff when it has accelerated at 32 feet per second, per second from above.
One of the ways the old plasterers used to hold the stuff up was to use nails - as few and as short as possible. Then they whacked in the cornices with some blobs of cornice cement. The cornices in effect provide a continuous ring which presses against the walls and thus act as a brake on the ceiling's downward thrust. Take away the cornice and the ceiling will be much less secure.
The other strategy plasterers adopted to create an illusion of ceiling security was to send up the apprentice with a bucket of rapid setting plaster and some fibrous material. Horse hair in the olden days, strands of fibre glass in the modern. Globs of the stuff would be draped over the joists and onto the upside of the plaster ceiling at strategic points. Provided there is no excessive force like an earthquake, the procedure seems to work well enough. But the method is about as crude as one can find in the many ways of holding a house together. It probably evolved from the ancestral use of cow pats. As I already indicated, the strength and security it provides is a bit illusory.
Anyway, back to my initial examination of the cornice in the kitchen. I was aware that messing about with such things had its risks, so I picked on a small section in a passageway leading the the back door. Getting the first bit of cornice off was no big deal. It just came away with some finger prying. Whoosh! A shower of dust and leaves followed. My boys were supposed to had vacuumed this away when they replaced the roof.
Never mind. The first bit of cornice was easy, what about the others? Bear in mind this was supposed to be a precursory examination. But there was no stopping me. Off came the other bits in a flash, with more showers of detritus.
"Are you all right?" sweetly called my wife from her stencilling station. "Yep! Just checking things out." I replied macho-like from the top of the ladder.
Looking at the ceiling I wondered just how secure it was. It wouldn't do any harm just to give it a bit of a tug at one end while I was on the ladder, just so I could get myself into the right frame of mind for planning the job properly.
About thirty seconds later I was still on the ladder, but with a sheet of ceiling supported on the triangle of my head and two outstretched arms. "Oh dearest." I called gently to my wife. "Would you mind giving me a bit of a hand here?"
She was there in a flash. She knew the tone in my voice. We got that section of the ceiling down okay. It didn't look so big on the ground. "That was easy." I observed.
We agreed it was a good day to start on the rest of the kitchen. My wife packed away her stencilling paints and we set about moving stuff from the kitchen to make room to work. There was a lot of stuff. Now the dining room is full of it. We need to have a garage sale.
The rest of the ceiling came down as easy as I predicted. The trick was to find the joins in the plaster sheets and cut them with a saw. Otherwise the whole lot might have come down at once. In all the job took about half an hour, followed by several hours of cleaning up. All the globs of fibre set over the joists in the past remained like little saddles. Every one of them had released their grip on the ceiling without a whimper. They lifted off easily because neither had they stuck to the wood.
The joists are still bare, as our cats have noticed. Straight up into the roof area as quick as a wink. They don't come down until they are good and ready - like when they are hungry.
This weekend we are going to start fitting the replacement tongue and groove mari timber panelling. There'll be no rush. It should take about three or four days at a leisurely pace. Hail to the mini nail gun and a modern glue called liquid nails.
We've settled on a new colour for the sickening yellow kitchen wall. It called Dulux Red Box. $80 for a four litre can, so I hope we like it. Anything will be better that the ghastly yellow.
© MMV Paul R. Weaver.
About the writerCheck out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days.
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