We're Not Into Crack

The life of a homeowner seems to be a constant battle against cracks (see here for the last battle installment).

Well there are other cracks that we have been assiduously ignoring (i.e. not putting pretty little pink crosses over them) ever since we moved into this house all of two years ago.

The cracks in our upstairs lounge and dining room ceilings. Which, I've just realised after comparing that above photo taken recently and this older one from when we moved in (see the telltale yellow walls?), appear to have been getting steadily worse.

Case in point... I took this shot the day the roof was replaced and I could see sunlight through the dining room ceiling.

Not ideal.

So! While my carpenters were at a loose end waiting for the plasterers to get the downstairs area re-plastered before they could go on with the rest of their work, I decided to set them to work on my poor upstairs ceilings.

First step? To create utter chaos in the dining and lounge rooms.

And by extension, the bedroom...

And even the bathroom.

And then they began ripping away the worst affected sections of the ceiling. Well, I should say "cutting" away, since the last thing we wanted was for the whole thing to come crashing down, and for those lovely ceiling roses in the middle to be damaged.

The ceiling itself was pretty fascinating. It was made up of this really coarse stuff with horsehair through it. No wonder the poor ceilings are drooping and sagging in some areas.

With the most damaged panels removed, they replaced them with fibre cement sheeting and put up new timber trim to match the old trim.

And then they moved on to the lounge ceiling, created a bit more chaos, and repeated the process! Allie tried her utmost to get underfoot as much as possible. And succeeded.

So then, wonderful brother that he is, Daniel got to work puttying and no-more-gaps-ing the screw holes and borders of each section so that we could one day have a fairly seamless ceiling again.

 And as much as the checkerboard effect had a certain charm...

It had to go. So Daniel sacrificed his arms and neck for the cause, and got up there and undercoated like there was no tomorrow!

Meaning that that worst area in the dining room went from this... to this!

The lounge is looking a lot neater too...

Although we've still got a lot of work ahead of us before either of these ceilings will look as they should. The ceiling rose in the lounge in particular needs quite a bit of paint-scraping attention before we can give it all a good proper couple of coats of paint.

That job is going to have to wait for another day, though. Too many more important things to get done first!