When I say ceiling I really mean only a small part. A first floor room (back bedroom) had a dodgy looking ceiling in one corner. There was a couple of cracks and a triangular shape looked lower than the rest of the ceiling in that room.
Ceiling before the collapse.
It is not a great photo shown above but the dodgy part of the ceiling can be seen behind the chandelier. Alas part of it has fallen down.
It clearly shows that the ceiling in this room is lathe and plaster. I can’t see any water damage and the walls show no cracking caused by movement so I’m really unsure why it has come away. I’m guessing that maybe the recent thermal changes has aggravated the loosening in this corner to encourage it to fall. The rest of the ceiling looks fine. So I’m hoping that the repair will only be needed in this corner and not the entire ceiling. Now that we have moved in I must get some scaffolding for use inside a room so I can get up their and really check it out.
After the clean up
After I had got most of the fallen plaster into the bucket I wanted to clean up the last of the plaster dust and small bits. I didn’t want to use our Dyson vacuum cleaner as the clear plastic dust container would have been sand blasted and made opaque. Instead I borrowed a Hokey Powerrotor 2400 carpet sweeper from work. That is the little box with a handle in the picture. It worked really well. I’m thinking we should buy one for general use around the house. It doesn’t need electricity so no searching for power points. It is also good in not stirring up the dust like the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner does.
Since the above photos were taken another chunk of the ceiling (the one that looked very loose) has fallen down. I suspect caused by thermal changes making the ceiling expand and contract as we went from 36C to 16C that day.
Other happenings
Various unpacking of boxes and moving furniture around. Also setting up a couple of beds with new mattresses.
A couple of days before Christmas we had some friends visit from Melbourne. We had a very pleasant lunch in the large room behind the balcony. It was simply too hot to be outside.
For Christmas we went to see my family this year and had a nice Christmas day dinner at my youngest brother’s house. It was nice to see everyone. On the way home we saw a small tornado, which was a first for me. This was near Cooma in NSW. It was quite small and did touch down without doing any significant damage. There appears to be more tornadoes in Australia over the last few years.
The tornado we saw
Yesterday we had some long distance travellers stop by for a viewing and cups of tea as they travelled home post-Christmas.
We have an arrangement in the back kitchen on the first floor with various kitchen cupboards. Some of the cupboards were already here and others have been used from a friends kitchen renovation. All modern looking. We have decided to see how it works before nailing them to the floors and walls. We will probably upgrade to more appropriate looking cupboards in the future too so it is all temporary. Yesterday I bought a lot of curtain brackets, curtain rods, and bits and bobs. So far I’ve installed one set as I have spent a lot of time on arranging the kitchen cupboards and cleaning them.
Cliftoria, an adventure in restoration 