The Boob Light Is History

Well, the easy work is done.

Most people wouldn’t think that. They think demolition and carpentry and plumbing and electricical work is hard, and anything to do with decorating is easy. I know better. Wiring a convenience outlet ain’t difficult. Stripping off four layers of wallpaper is hard, dudes and dudettes. Especially when some of the layers have been painted.

There are various labor-saving devices for scoring the face of the wallpaper to make it easier to wet the backing and get it off the wall. They cost money, they don’t work, and they damage the wall. But other than that, they’re great. I simply know that there’s no free lunch, and get on with it. I’ve stripped acres of wallpaper over the years. If the wallpaper was painted with oil paint, it could be pretty hard to get the steam to the backing, it’s true. But we just got a handsaw out of the truck and dragged the teeth over the paper to score it a little. No late night commercial purchases necessary.

Wallpaper steamers were once big propane-fired boilers that sat in the middle of the room and made Mike Mulligan noises. You had to rent them by the day, and they made gouts of steam, I tell you what. It was a good job to undertake in February. Not so much in July. Nowadays, you can buy a little steamer for a few quid and it works well enough. You can use the little kettle and hose to make a steam box to bend wood, too. I have. My wife is constitutionally incapable of taking a photograph, but I’m holding the steamer “plate” in my left hand, and squeezing adhesive out of a sponge with my right. The spare heir is sleeping in the corner, I think.

Old wallpaper paste is just flour. I used to buy the stuff way back when. If we had an old-skool customer, we’d sometimes use the old-fashioned stuff. The labels used to say, DO NOT EAT, adorned with a skull and crossbones. Everyone knew it was some form of flour back during the Depression, and plenty of people were plain hungry. Some people used wallpaper paste in powdered form to make bread. I’m not sure if it’s accurate, but super old-timers on my first jobs said that they government forced the manufacturers to put poison in it, because they didn’t like citizens getting around some recovery scheme they had running that wasn’t working. That sounded like an urban legend to me. I imagine the manufacturers starting putting in poison to kill any mice that tried to eat the stuff on the shelf. In my experience, risky behavior antedates TikTok by a country mile. Hell, people were drinking methanol back then. It might make you blind, but hey, great party. I wouldn’t be surprised if they figured a little rat poison made the wallpaper paste bread rise quicker. It tastes like rye, Jethro!

This room had an absurd ceiling fan in it when we moved in. We put a “boob” light in its place. Shortly after that, we disconnected the knob and tube circuit that served it, and were back in the dark again. We’ll get proper light in here, finally. I skipped the whole curlicue light bulb era. I hoarded regular light bulbs for a while, and then made the leap directly to LEDs. We punched four holes in the plaster ceiling, and fished wires between them and back to a new wall switch. We put a dimmer in. These lights are an older version of LEDs. The holes were filled with the same sort of can light that used to have incandescent bulbs in them. The LED  disk had a trailing wire with a threaded fitting like a regular light bulb. They have integrated trim rings, which was a money saver. We’ve since morphed into using the canless variety of LED lights in the rest of the house. They’re pretty nifty, and easy to retrofit.

The place was getting kinda crowded. We patched up the existing plaster walls where we could. The long, straight, angular patches are backed up with paper drywall tape. We use ceiling buttons to shore up any plaster sagging away from the lath.

Doorway is taped and mudded in  Lights are in and working, which increases productivity a bit. Patches everywhere. The boob light is history. Time to sand the patches.

I had an employee once. Hi Joe! Great guy. He’s a lawyer now. He was fond of needling me. I was fond of giving him the worst jobs available on the jobsite. It sort of evened out. We were renovating an enormous restaurant/brewery type place. Someone came in, looking for me. They asked Joe where they could find me. “As far away from the sandpaper as you can get,” was his answer. True dat.

But there was no place to hide in this room, and no one to hide from. We have an apparatus for sanding that works well, though. You put a sanding screen on a handle that has a hose for a shop vac. It’s still hard work, and plenty noisy, but there’s no clouds of dust in the room.

We refinished the woodwork after stripping off the errant paint. I suspect that all the oak trim in our house was this dark walnut color at one time. This is the last room where it hasn’t been altered. This is the “cutting in” stage of painting. If you’ve ever listened to a painting crew at work, everyone fights over the roller. No one wants to cut in. The roller is like the front passenger seat on a road trip. You have to call it early.

The picture isn’t accurate color-wise. The color isn’t very peachy in real life. More like a buckskin. Hey look, the window is square again, and goes up and down, and closes properly. Wonders never cease around here. We’ll have to do something wonderful to that baseboard with the plug in it. Maybe tomorrow.

[To be continued. Feel free to mock me in the comments]