All The Comforts Of Home

We bought the house next door for my parents to have them closer to us so we could help them as some things become difficult for them as they age. We bought the house as a foreclosure and this meant there were somethings that needed to be done before my folks could move in. It needed all the appliances and a fresh coat of paint but in addition there was a spot in the mater bedroom where a pocket door had been added and the dry wall had never been finished. Clint and along with our super helper took on the job.

Caelun helps dad measure and cut the dry wall.

The hard part of the job was putting spacers on the studs to make the drywall thickness match the rest of the wall. When the pocket door was installed they went back to the studs but the dry wall was put on top of the existing plaster walls making them an irregular depth. To make it more interesting the depth issue wasn’t consistent. Clint did some very creative shim cutting and I did some very creative drywall mudding to make it all work but work it did.

The top layer of wall paper on the plaster above the door.

I brought these from the farm and my dad has been moving them with him since 1948. He came home from WWII and went to college on the GI Bill at Michigan State University- what was at that time called Michigan Agricultural College. When he was there he worked odd jobs to support his family and one of those jobs was as a house painter and builder. When he was working on a job the person he was working for was looking to get rid of this desk and shelves.  He traded the set for a day of work. I hauled it out of the study at the farm, and this is it installed in his new study after a bath with a five gallon bucket of Murphy’s Oil Soap  and water and an entire bottle of restore a finish. There is a chair as well but that is going to require more work. My dad was even surprised at how well it cleaned up. I found postage stamps from the 1950’s stuck in one of the back compartments. Not to bad for having been hauled around for over half a century.