More on walls

Nothing dramatic, image-wise, but the walls are almost finished. For a few more days, I'll be adding successive coverings of wallboard compound, and smoothing out the plaster that I've added, but pretty much all of the structural items are taken care of. The two holes in the soffit are almost invisible now, and after tomorrow's coating of compound, they should start looking pretty good. I mounted the concrete board (actually duraflex) for where the tiles will go. It was basically a full day of touch up, sanding, compounding and taping. Oh, and we have some Ann Sacks tiles (the mint green Savoy, but in the stacked tiles, not the offset) that match our original color green very nicely—perhaps too nicely not to use. And they fit nicely in the space, as well.

One discovery—as you may now, the walls of the kitchen (at least, underneath the chair rail that runs around the room) look like they have old tiles on them, painted over many times. But they don't—that's just a popular technique from the 1930s, in which plaster would be pressed with a tile pattern just before it dried. But when I went to work on some peeling paint, I discovered something interesting—the kitchen also used to be painted in the same pattern: black lines to divide the "tiles" and then tiles in alternating orange and brown? In other words, at one time, our kitchen was—no kidding—plaid. Is this the original paint job? On the wall where I uncovered it, it would appear to be so, but on other walls, the base coating looks peach/tan colored.

Finally, I adjusted the last of the sockets so that's it's actually even with the light switch that it's right next to. Boy, we overpaid for the electrical!