Load-bearing Caulk

The first week, I was ready to go. Every night I wanted to go out there and make a difference in the house. Now, I just want to hurry up and paint so that I can move in. Unfortunately, we are still a long ways out before painting...and frankly the house looks worse than when we started.

We have started repairing cracks in the plaster instead of just painting them like the others before us have done. I also made the executive decision to strip the old trim to restore it. I still want to paint the trim and baseboards, but some of the doors won't shut with the twenty or so layers of paint and it has peeled where it rubs against the door jamb. However, it has taken me a total of three working days to strip and sand the trim around just one door. Others would have been satisfied at day two, but I realized far too late, that this was not a job for a perfectionist. My new executive decision is to sand down the high and drippy spots in the trim and strip only if necessary. I am a little concerned about lead in the paint, but of course we wear dust masks and respirators. Since the trim hasn't always been painted, there is a pretty good chance that it was painted after 1980 and doesn't have lead in it. Who wants to take chances really?

This was just day one...




With the amount of time that we have spent working on the trim and baseboard, we noticed that there is an abundance of caulk around all these things. People have since painted over the caulk and it has cracked the paint. It looks terrible. With a sharp knife, and a serious amount of determination, we have started removing all the caulk. What is most shocking is how they used the caulk. Not just around windows, but under the trim, plugging holes near the window, etc... Perhaps this is load-bearing caulk.

Brice has said that when people ask what the house is made of we should say it is a vinyl/brick/plaster/caulk house.