A little knowledge...

We had a lot of fun ripping out the study - removing the skirting board and picture rail. The "demolition" part of a job is always so much more enjoyable than the recreation even if the latter is, in the end, more rewarding.

It's easy to go too far though. And if it's easy to go too far, you can bet I will.

Many of the "outside" corners in our rooms (mainly on chimney breasts) have the old dowel finish to the corner rather than the modern angle bead. It makes the corners look as though they have piping on them. In it's original condition it looks really nice (IMO) but as most of our rooms have been Artexed (yuck!) the corners have ended up looking like the edges of a badly-iced cake so, in the study at least, we planned to replace them with new angle bead to get that crisp modern corner.

It seemed natural to me then, while I was ripping out, to take the dowel out too. Nikki's side of the study wasn't too bad - being originally a small room it doesn't have any cornice to worry about, and the dowel came right out nice and clean. My side wasn't so clever. I didn't realise until the dowel was almost out that it disappeared behind the cornice. By then it was too late...a large crack had appeared and it was clear I wasn't going to be able to remove the dowel without causing more damage. Here's the hole after replastering. There's a similar one on the other side.

"Oh well," thinks I, "I can fill it afterwards." But here's where the title of this post comes in. The plasterer arrived and while he scoped out the job I disappeared into the kitchen to brew up. A few minutes later he came to find me:

"What possessed you to take the dowels off the corners?"
"Err...I thought it would make it easier to bead up."
"I usually nail the bead to the dowel! Oh well, I'll figure something out. Life's full of little challenges."

Doh!

Four rounds of filling and sanding later, and the cornice is almost back in shape. This still has one more sanding to go, just to straighten out that leading edge so that it doesn't skew to the side so badly. Once it's all painted you'll hardly be able to tell there was a hole there at all. The rest of the cornice isn't exactly pristine having suffered some shifting and cracking over the years, but we love it and we definitely wanted to preserve it, so I'm glad I managed to put it back almost how it was. But if I hadn't been so gung-ho about ripping everything out in the first place, life would have been much simpler - for the plasterer and for me!