De Plane! De Plane!
So here’s a funny thing about plaster walls. First, they crack and crumble, compelling you to rip them down and hang new drywall. For a fleeting moment, life in your home seems better with new drywall – you can do fun and fancy things like hang pictures without losing a one-foot chunk of wall.
However, what gets a little screwy with your newly drywalled walls is that the drywall is thinner than your former lath and plaster walls. This causes the door frames and window frames to jut out quite a bit further than your new, thinner drywalled walls. And this becomes a problem when it’s time to rehang the original trim in your home because it no longer sits flush against the door and window frames and your newly drywalled walls.
Who woulda thunk it? Not Joey and I. We were rather surprised to find that our old door and window frames were a 1/4” thicker than our new drywalled walls. Maybe you’re thinking “Liz, if you actually thought your walls, with their 1/2” drywall, would be the same thickness as lath and plaster, you must have been living with Tattoo on Fantasy Island.” And perhaps I was, but really, how can you blame me? That place is way nicer than my half-finished shack in blizzard-ridden Wisconsin.
So…how do two “We’re Still Figuring it Out” home remodelers solve this problem? With a planer, that’s how!
Here it is in action, trimming down our door frames in the foyer.
It did the job well, except the portion of the tool that does the actual planing couldn’t reach all the way down to the floor.
Resulting in this…
A little section we had to chisel down. Not a huge deal, but enough of an inconvenience to slow the project down.
Also, holy crap is it messy. It has a little compartment to contain sawdust, but it fills up in about 1 minute.
It took about 5 minutes to get a bucket-full of sawdust and about 10 minutes for Joey to get annoyed by constantly having to stop and empty the compartment.
It took about 5 minutes to get a bucket-full of sawdust and about 10 minutes for Joey to get annoyed by constantly having to stop and empty the compartment.
This is what happens to your house when your irritated husband decides to work more “efficiently” by removing the sawdust trap from the planer. I thought about vacuuming a little message to you guys in the sawdust, but that wouldn’t be very efficient, now would it?
We had to do the same thing with our door frames! What a pain in the butt!!
Power planers are fun, but they are quite messy. I also prefer to clean things up after as opposed to being careful and prepping things. 🙂