Originally posted by monochrome My (then not yet) brother-in-law took me aside in 1979 and warned me about the withering glance. Then he taught me how to fly fish. Because "all the trout streams near here are beyond the event horizon".
[EDIT: Prophetic post.
Mrs. monochrome just pulled that corner of the children's bathroom wallpaper away from the wall - you know, that corner where they didn't properly close the shower curtain for 20 years so that corner peeled up a bit - and pulled, and pulled, and pulled . . . .
"Drywall Mud won't fill that."
. . .
"Well don't get mad at ME!," I said. "It isn't MY fault drywall mud won't properly fill a 1' x 3' hole in a plastered wall."
. . . "I'd think you could do
SOMETHING!!!"
"Well, I
can do
some things, but I
can't do
plaster. I don't have the materials, the tools or the skill"
. . . "WHY DON'T YOU JUST TRY!!!!"
"Oh for cripes sake. It won't work. You know it and I know it. We've been doing this kind of thing to houses for thirty years. We'll have to call someone."
. . . "I DON'T WANT TO CALL SOMEONE - "
"Well, why did you pull that wallpaper off in the first place then?"
. . .
Yikes.]
[EDIT 2: I just cleaned up after carefully applying the first cut of drywall mud to the affected area of plaster. I figure by next weekend I'll be ready to glue the wallpaper back down.
(It isn't going to work.)]
I've had to make repairs to lath and plaster walls around bathroom fixtures before. What I have discovered is that a 1" x 3" hole becomes 1' x 3' repair after you clean up all the adjacent decay. Sometimes the chicken wire and lath are in such bad shape that if you don't go as far as it takes to get to good, solid material you will be back in there soon, doing the same work again.
And then the rules (unwritten and constantly changing of course) will dictate that you should have recruited professional help the first time.
Also, as in my case, the house was over 100 years old, and had been added on to, modified, and "fixed" by far too many "experts" over the years. But the quality (or lack thereof) of prior work and repairs is never acknowledged or even considered while the present "maintenance" is underway.
When it was all said and done I may have been better off to have simply sold the place and moved into a new home.
And had I done so a K3 would have been out of the question.