I signed on to help renovate a rundown wing of an old elementary school before the new term starts, thinking it would just be a simple case of patching some drywall and putting up fresh bulletin boards. Instead, trying to bring an ancient sixties school building up to modern safety codes turned into a total disaster. Dealing with decades of layers of old linoleum glue and crumbling plaster turned the whole classroom block into a giant grind.
The demolition phase was easily the most frustrating part of the whole week. The previous maintenance crews had apparently glued the old corkboards directly onto the raw plaster walls using heavy industrial adhesive, so prying the panels loose just ended up tearing giant holes straight through to the interior brickwork. I spent four hours hunched over on a wobbly stepladder with a heavy scraper, aggressively chipping away at the hardened glue crust until my wrists were totally stiff from the pressure. A massive cloud of white chalk dust covered the entire floor within ten minutes.
Then came the real nightmare of leveling out the subfloor before the new safety mats could go down. The concrete slab underneath the old teacher’s desk section had settled over the years, creating a massive two inch dip right in the middle of the main walkway. I had to mix up three heavy batches of self leveling cement in a bucket and pour it across the floor tracking, frantically troweling the wet muck before it setup too fast under the humid room heat.
The new drywall panels are completely taped and sanded down now and the wall surfaces look solid. The heavy duty vinyl floor planks are locked into the floor tracking tightly and the new whiteboard frames are securely bolted straight into the wall studs. The classroom space functions completely normally now.