Being Moist

When a friend of ours recently stated categorically that he wanted to be moist, I thought he'd lost his mind. Being moist has been nothing but trouble for us since we moved into this gaff. In his case, however, he was after playing the part of Moist in any potential production of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. Whereas in our case it's a question of too much rain and leaking showers.

Since we first had those problems, the roof has been fixed and so has the shower, but what we're left with is some damp damage to the decorating in the study, and a small area of replastered kitchen ceiling that's a bit of an eyesore.

The damage in the study comprises flaking paint on the ceiling above Nikki's chimney breast, together with some slight lifting of the plaster on the vertical surfaces just below, so the first task was to scrape back all the loose material and paint it over with some "stain stop" solvent-based paint.

There's no evidence (in terms of damp smells or watermarks) that this area is still being moistened on a regular basis, but I know from experience that damp stains are tenacious buggers and will bleed through regular paint unless special measures are taken. I've had good results with the stain stopper before, so I'm sticking with what I know works.

Since the plaster damage extends over quite a large area I've invested in a tub of SmoothOver along with the relevant toolset. Parts of the kitchen ceiling will also benefit from a liberal application of this jollop (the bits where our plasterer hadn't taken as much care as usual owing to us making the mistake of admitting we'll be having the whole ceiling replastered at some stage), and while I'm at it there's those large cracks around what used to be the bathroom door, where the jobbing plasterer subcontracted by the World's Worst Bathroom Fitters didn't give a shit and slapped his mix on the minimum possible area to qualify as "his job."

Hard to believe that one small tub of ready-mixed Polyfilla could be so versatile in fixing three of the niggling little jobs left over from some of the major works of the last two-and-a-bit years.