More than we bargained for!!!

One of our main preparation foes at Mt. Sterling is MOLD!  There was plenty of it again this year.  The basement of the sister workers' quarters was especially full of the nasty stuff.  SO, Kim, Pina and I decided to tackle it the first day as a team.  We would scrub ceiling and walls to try and eliminate the fuzzies as well as the odor (which was enough to make me gag when I walked down there).  We began scrubbing after we were properly attired (pictures to come).  Pina and I began working on the ceiling, and Kim started on the walls.  One "slight" problem, however, is that the ceiling was textured.  After a while, we decided that perhaps scraping would work better than scrubbing.  At one point, I made the comment, "Maybe we should just scrape the whole ceiling."  This was because as we scrubbed / scraped, the ceiling was becoming quite unevenly textured.  The goal to remove the mold was being achieved, but the result was visually less than pleasing.  We kind of laughed it off as a preposterous idea, since our scrapers were small and the ceiling was large.  To make a long story a little shorter - that is what we ended up doing.  We found a friend with a large water sprayer and some larger scrapers and went to work "de-texturing" the ceiling.  It was quite fun, actually, but as you may imagine, made quite a mess.  There was plaster EVERYWHERE!  So, after the fun part came the clean up part which was decidedly less fun and more frustrating since the plaster stuff did NOT want to go away.  The next week, we primed and painted the entire basement.  The end result was very nice, and the three of us (Kim, Pina and me) slept very nicely in that space during convention.  Now for the pictures...

Pina - expert ceiling scraper

Kim - sprayer extraordinaire

Kamela - How did I get stuck doing the corner with all the pipes?

Water wars!

Go team!

We may look ridiculous, but we do good work.  (And let me assure you, all the garb ended up being very necessary!)

The process

Kind of hard to see all the plaster dust, but everything is coated with a nice layer.

Now you can see it a little better.

 I'll try and find a finished picture for a later post.  ( I hope I have one!)  Anyway, take my word for it, it looked better after we were done.  :-)