Home repairs - library edition

I continue to wait on a mud man for my bedroom and hallway. I'm about ready to put an ad on Craigslist or speak in a loud voice about my need for a mud man while at HomeDepot and see who responds.

Since that has been holding things up upstairs, I used this weekend to bust out some stuff in my future library. The Christmas trees came down first thing. That opened up a lot of space. I put away boxes of stuff that has been moved from DC but never given a proper home. Actually, I did that all over my house. Gandolf's perch got moved to the basement. Recycling went in one box, styrofoam in a bag, trash in another bag, and it all went in the car to take to the dump. Carpet was ripped out, linoleum samples framed and the rest ripped up, and all of it off to the dump.

linoleum samples - oldest on the right, newest on the left

With the room pretty well emptied out, I started trying to scrape wallpaper off the wall my bookshelves will be built along. The paint layer screwed up the ability of the wallpaper remover fluid to knock the wallpaper loose. The extra effort it took to get through that caused me to start putting holes in the elderly plaster. So I gave up, covered the door with a tarp and hung plastic on the back side of the wall to keep plaster from falling into the basement. Then took down the plaster as carefully and in as big chunks as possible to keep the mess small. The lath came down next and ended up on the massive lath pile in the basement.

Inside the wall were some wires that I put in several months ago. But there was also one that answered some questions. Before, a wire came out of the wall inside the old ceiling, ran along, went up into my future bedroom to an outlet that didn't work, came back down, ran over to a bad splice, and back into the wall. I'd already removed the outlet in the bedroom, leaving two dangling wires in the library. Both wires caused the tic counter (voltage tester pen) to light up at a low level so I was understandably hesitant to mess with them. But now I could see that the wire wasn't hooked up to anything at all. So I yanked it out. The other wire I took tin snips to so the rest would hide up in the ceiling.

Then I used most of my remaining drywall to close the wall back up. Not being 100% satisfied I then tore down and rebuilt the wall right next to it. Most of it, anyway. I got frustrated with having bags of plaster and lath to keep moving around and stopped. I think I'll have to get a dumping permit to get rid of my plaster since I can't take it to the normal dump.