Totally Worth Saving
See this wall? It’s in my house. And I’m keeping it.
Wondering why I would save something that looks like it might collapse by the time you finish reading this? Yeah, I am too. Here’s the thing – over 60 percent of my house is in various stages of being drywalled or mudded, and knowing there’s one less wall to deal with does amazing things for my mental and emotional state. I appreciate this wall. I love this wall. So, how am going to fix it? It’s surprisingly pretty easy to do…
First, I have a confession to make. Those scary looking cracks weren’t nearly that bad before I attacked the wall with a utility knife. No, I didn’t do it in a fit of remodeling rage, though my house so deserves to be bludgeoned with a hammer (Oh wait, I already did that…). That wall was covered in a webbing of hairline cracks, and in order to truly repair the cracks, you have to split them open and carve out all the loose plaster. Once you have the cracks opened up and cleared out, you spray them down with water and patch them with 90-minute mud (see ‘Mudding Mania’ to learn more about this type of mud). Let the mud dry and then sand over the cracks to smooth things out. Then mud them again. And probably one more time to just to be safe. And then sand them again, because it’s so much fun. By the way, that wall is in our guest bedroom, which, when composed of walls without gaping holes, is really quite lovely.
Here’s what the wall looked like after mudding the cracks:
So much prettier, right? No, not so much. But it is a little less scary looking. That’s what the wall looks like at this very moment. We’re debating what type of texture to apply to disguise the imperfections that come along with trying to make a 90-year-old wall look new again.
P.S. Really early on in this blog, I mentioned that our old walls have horse hair mixed into the plaster to make it stronger. Here’s a great example of it: 
At first I thought it was cool, but it’s actually kind of nasty, isn’t it?