Ceiling Work

 This week it is ceiling work.  When I first got here there were holes in the ceiling of the Ward building due to something like carpenter ants.  The ceiling board is made from wood chip/fiber.  It is very heavy but easily damaged and easy for the termites and carpenter ants to digest.  So this month is the month I am attacking the bats in the attic spaces of our medical buildings again.  This includes removing all the bat guano(crap) from the ceiling spaces and then spraying down the bats with a strong pesticide that attacks the nervous system.  The picture below is of the bat crap I pulled out of just the Ward building.  

For the next couple of days we found dead bats all around the building.  All in all I counted about 35 dead bats which means I still have 10 to 15 holding on for dear life after several sprayings.

In addition as I was working the fellow below was found and killed.  Those that know me well know I have good reason to hate snakes.  No good snake but a dead snake-I don't care what they do good for the environment by killing other things or if they are harmful to me or not.  You get bit or watch someone die from a snake bite and tell me you don't want to kill them all.

Now on to the main topic of today's blog.  The holes in the ceiling and fixing them.  We had several holes all in the children's room.  One large set of holes that required replacing the ceiling board.

The toughest part of this was removing the 50 something nails and get the edges where I cut the old board smooth.  Like I said these are really heavy so a nail every inch is just about right.

We also had several smaller holes that I did not want to replace the whole ceiling board to fix.  These were about th 6 inches long and wide enough for my fist to go through.  They don't sell wallboard repair kits here so I came up with my own.  

Recently I had purchased a staple gun in Arusha for some craft projects I wanted to work on eventually.  So I took the mosquito screen we had left over from screening the windows and stapled it to the back side (attic side) of the ceiling board.

Then I took some of my gypsum wall plaster mix that I used to coat the walls in my kitchen.  I applied it from the attic side as well and pushed it through the screen.

After that I went back to inside the building and smoothed out the surface.  

After it dried I touched it up and painted.  So another decent solution to a problem.