chickens little
Some people just plaster their ceilings and call it good. But some people, like the people who used to live in my house, feel driven to go the extra mile.After plastering the ceiling, they wallpapered it. Then they painted it yellow – and it took quite a coat of yellow to hide the paper. Then they glued up half-inch brown fibrous acoustic soundboard. They used thick brown industrial-strength glue, saying to themselves, perhaps, We’ll certainly never want to take down this attractive brown fibrous acoustic soundboard! Because you can’t peel off this kind of adhesive without completely destroying the plaster. But to be absolutely secure they also nailed the board to the lathe, and nailed it well. And by “well” I mean thoroughly. Lots of different sized nails – finishing nails and box nails and galvanized nails and tacks – in random spacing and clustering. Then with the leftover glue they secured a layer of white pock-marked interlocking ceiling tiles. Then they stapled them. Just to be sure.
And I know all of this, now, because at six o’clock last night I looked across the dinner table at PD and said, naively, I’d like to do a little project. Let’s do a little project, she replied with enthusiasm.
I don’t know what made us decide that pulling the ceiling down was a Little Project. I guess at first it seemed like it might just involve ripping off a few foamy tiles. Except even a casual observer would have noted that the ceiling tiles were, as per custom, up on the ceiling, which in my house is quite high. So right from the start we were standing on the counters and pushing the rolling, broken dishwasher into strategic corners of the floor, stretching our arms over our heads with prybars. Dust and staples started falling into our eyes and onto our dishes, neither of which we’d bothered to cover.
By two hours later, when PD said Let’s just take off the soundboard too, we had acquired face masks. We had moved most of the food off of the kitchen surfaces. Sunlight was still coming in the kitchen windows and PD was wearing sunglasses because I only have one pair of goggles. That’s when the plaster started falling.
The acoustic board had been hung in a variety of rectangles of various size, puzzled together to cover the space. Some of the pieces were eight inches square. But others were three feet by seven feet. They were filthy and heavy and would rip free with little warning, propelling chunks of stuck-on plaster through the air to shatter on the floor or the stove. After each bang and burst, a quiet cloud of plaster dust would rain slowly down.
It was all fun and games until the board with mouse shit came down, and PD was right underneath. PD is not someone I would call squeamish. There aren’t many things I can think of that would gross her out. But I’m pretty sure this did it. It was obnoxiously awful, and it fell right on her head. To our relief there was only one board like this – a single board in the corner of the kitchen, underneath the attic space where apparently mice used to live. It was revolting. It was not fun.
It got fun again, though, when we pulled the final side of the final board. We felt so close to being done. There was a mess, for sure, but a manageable mess, and there were holes in the plaster, but the neat little grid of lathe remained. There was no reason to think the last board would be any different. But it turns out that just for novelty, there was no lathe behind the final board. Instead, it had been anchored directly to the ceiling framing of the room, and the board itself – with nothing above it – had been serving as the floor of the mysterious inaccessible attic. So in the moment after we pulled it free – in the moment when it hung in the air, six feet of soundboard suspended by a row of nails along one edge - we saw the layer above: a mountain of mucky, puffy, ancient insulation, loose once-white fluff in a two-foot-thick pile. And then the nails gave.
It took about an hour to shovel and sweep and wipe, to fish the bits of dusty debris out of our stovetop burners and off of our casserole dishes. And then there was nothing left on my kitchen ceiling but plaster crisscrossed with amusing patterns of glue residue, and little cut-outs of lathe.
And then we flew kites in the park by the moon.
posted by tortaluga @ 10:07 AM
5 Comments:
Hmmm...
http://supak.com/simpsons/wavs/marge_simpson_kite_at_night.wav
holy fuck I just laughed until I pulled a rib.
damn. i wish portland was closer. i would love to help you rip stuff out of your house to make it better. (yes - i would stay for the fixing part) too bad i have no time off this summer...
love,
caro xoxo
This comment has been removed by the author.
There's a park by the moon? How did you get there!
Post a Comment
<< Home