Fix-It Friday - I'm claiming genius!!

For those of you who don't know, we are trying to fix up Ephraim's big-boy room. He needs to get out of the nursery before the baby comes - sooner actually as he's getting awfully heavy for me to lift in and out of his crib. Anyway, we wanted to demo the shelves in the closet in order to put in a closet organizer. No big deal, right? I wish.

Apparently a former owner (who knows how long ago, the house is 110+ years old) decided to use no anchors or anything when placing shelf supports on the walls, just to nail (3-4 inch nails at least) through the tiny little lathe strips behind their plaster. Needless to say, when Ed tried to remove said supports, we ended up with large sections of missing plaster in the closet and a few cracked or mutilated lathes.

Missing Lathe

Cracked Lathe - two spots (only one shows in the picture)

After discussion with each other and suggestions from family and friends, we decided it wasn't worth it to redo the whole closet now and instead we plan to just patch the plaster. Unfortunately it occurred to me while speaking with my mom today, that if we push plaster into the areas where the lathes have been cracked or are missing, we may end up filling up the whole wall cavity with plaster. How do we fix or replace these lathes without creating more work for ourselves?

Enter Jenna Maanum, genius of the day! I hope my solution works, because it cost me nothing and only took about 45 minutes to find what I needed around the house and manage to get it done.

Here's the missing lathe from above!

Here's the lathe that was cracked in two places!

Nothing like finding a good use for old, used paint stir sticks and a couple of miscellaneous screws. I just drilled a pilot hole through the stick and lathe and then screwed the stick to the outside of the lathe. My first attempt cracked the stir stick - they are surprisingly fragile, but a slightly larger drill bit did the trick. I hope Ed is as impressed with me as I am with myself. Hopefully we'll be able to start some serious patching tonight when he gets home or tomorrow! I'd love to have all the patching done by the end of the weekend. It all depends on how long it takes the layers of plaster to dry. Wish us luck!!