The Parlor Plaster

We have two parlors with marble fireplaces and antique mirrors, behind which we never looked until recently. In our seven years in this house, we've never gotten around to painting these rooms and filling them with bookshelves. I imagined a little window seat in the front parlor, and cupboards below the shelves, for board games. The back parlor is our music room, it's where we keep our piano. The mirrors are a bit over-the-top for me—we didn't buy a Victorian house because we like the Victorian aesthetic. We bought the house because it's a happy, rambling, lovable house.



As it turns out, the mirror in the front parlor concealed something rather unfortunate and scary, a bulge like something out of a Cronenberg movie.

No matter how much you love your house, you don't want it to breathe.

You don't want the sense that your house is about to vomit on you, or something worse.

This wall was that kind of wall. Creepy.



Once we had carefully and nervously removed the heavy, valuable mirror from the wall without breaking it, I got a good look at the bulge. As if I didn't need more evidence that my house is just another version of my body, the damage, most likely the remains of a long-ago-addressed leak, reminded me of the belly cast my husband and I tried—and miserably but hilariously failed—to take when I was nine months pregnant with my son.

Well, we got our restoration craftsman to come, circle the room in plastic, and knock it out. Now it's looking fine.

It never ceases to amaze me how frightening it is when even a hairline crack appears in one's house, yet how relatively easy it is to address most problems. Most, anyway. Maybe a house with nothing wrong, nothing showing that's wrong, is similar to a false sense of security. It's just a matter of time before things get thrown out of balance. Lately, I'm getting to appreciate the false sense of security. It's better than no security at all. In fact, we should be really grateful for any sense of security. Its falseness matters no more than an effective placebo's falseness matters. What matters is the effectiveness. What matters is feeling good, right?

Knocking out old crumbly walls and laying down a fresh skimcoat feels good: cool, smooth, clean plaster. No cracks here.