The Mysterious Dining Room Wall Pits

Books By Patti Liszkay
​Available On amazon

"Equal and Opposite Reactions" http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
and the sequel, "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
By Patti Liszkay
Available on Amazon

​THE MYSTERIOUS DINING ROOM WALL PITS

...Continued from previous post:
     And so by Monday afternoon of last week my old dining room wallpaper was gone, the chair rail was gone, and all cracks, craters, faults and flaws in the walls had been plastered over, sanded down, primed and cleaned up, and the walls were ready to be painted. 
     Or so I thought.
​     I ran my hand over the renovated wall surfaces. Considering the mess they'd been, they were now so perfectly smooth and flawless.
      Or so I thought.
      It wasn't until two days later, after Tom applied the first coat of semi-gloss to the walls,

...that the pits appeared.
           On areas all around the  wall  there were now constellations of  mysterious tiny pits, some like pin pricks,

...others like small pock marks.

       "The heck did these pits come from?" I asked Tom. 
       He had no idea, but assured me that he did nothing differently with the paint or the roller than what he'd been doing for the past 50 years.
        We scrolled around the internet looking for an answer, but the plethora of possibilities we came across were as imponderable as the oracle at Delphi. So we consulted a handy friend who knows from home remodeling projects.
        The problem, the friend told us, likely originated in the plastering phase. Chances are that the patching compound wasn't sufficiently stirred to get all the air bubbles out before the compound was applied to the wall. This caused the bubbles to surface and burst into tiny holes on the wall. Our friend suggested that the problem could have been remedied by a second coat of patching compound before the primer was applied.
          So now we were two layers past the source of the problem.
         Our friend broke it to us that the only dependable solution was to sand off the paint and primer and spackle the holes, then re-sand, re-prime, and re-paint the walls.
         "But why," I asked our friend, "did the pits only show up after the first coat of semi-gloss? Why didn't we see or feel them before?"
         Our friend didn't know the answer. Neither did we. Yet another mystery.
         However, what was perfectly clear was that we now had three options moving forward:
         1. We could call that contractor back to fix our walls;
         2. We could write off the contractor and Tom could do the repair work himself; or
         3. We could say @#$% it and live with the *&%# pits in the %&#* walls.
         We decided on option number 2.
​         I went around the room and marked every spot where the walls were pitted.

     The pattern mostly corresponded to where the mysterious panels had been plastered over (see previous post, https://www.ailantha.com/blog/the-mystery-behind-the-wallpaper)​. 
     And so Tom sanded, spackled, and repainted the walls,

...which now look fine.

      It's clear that we do not have good home remodeling karma.