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Projects | Cattle Shoot or Plaster Wall Patching

Some of you may be familiar with a cattle shoot.  This device forces a herd of cattle into a usually less than happy single file line.  Doing this allows the rancher, farmer or vet to control each animal for inspection, tagging, etc. 

Much to our surprise we had a cattle shoot on the third floor of our old home.  The third floor is where the servants lived.  As you can see from the picture, there is a fairly narrow passage from the stairs to the three rooms of the third floor.    If you look closely at the floor, you will notice that the old shelves took up almost half of the passageway.  

So, what does this have to do with the new third floor bathroom you ask (since it seems that everything has something to do with that blasted project).   Joe the Plumber is almost magical with plumbing, but he is not a mover.  We all came to realize that getting the new shower stall, vanity, toilet, and floor materials past the cattle shoot was just...well too hard.   The shelves had to go. 

The shelves used to house really important, precious stuff like curtains from three houses ago, a candle votive we forgot we bought, and the most interesting of all....a paper from 23 September 1943.   Look below for just a few story headlines and ads. 

Removing the shelves also revealed the original color of the floor, a sort of mustard shade.  We were not impressed and decided to not go for the "original look" when we finally get to refinishing the floors. The baseboard, however, looks wonderful and we will try to find a way of duplicating that color.  I have had some success with using the PolyShades brand and will experiment with that for a bit before sloshing great quantities of coating all over the place. 

Even though I was careful when removing the shelves, I managed to ding up the walls.  All of that will have to be repaired, along with a good size crack in the corner. How I repaired all that follows. 

Looks like Anna is going to paper the passageway, so I have started repairing the wall.  While that dries, I will call Joe the Plumber to let him know the new shower stall should slip in as smooth as silk. 

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