Repairing Stairwell Walls

My brother and I finished the hallway upstairs.  Next, Willie starts preparing walls in the stairwell.  

My brother Will sits on a temporary wooden scaffold.  It's oriented strandboard (osb) custom fit for the stairwell, and supported by wooden cleets bolted into the wall.  I'll be taping the corner joints and doing some skim coats.  My brother will do web tape crack repairs and the sanding between skim coats of drywall compound. 

Will is checking the wall surface for hairline cracks to be repaired with web tape embedded with Durabond.  He wets the yellow painted wall with a spray bottle to remove spits of old wallpaper.

The former owners started to remove wallpaper, then stopped, change their strategy and decided to paint the walls covering small spits of stuck wallpaper, and larger areas of wallpaper.     

We have some thumb size areas of missing plaster and will use rock hard Durabond to make those repairs.  Good News: the stained glass window and trim is dirty but in good shape.  No moisture damage anywhere to be seen. 

We found the original picture rail in the attic, and will re-use it in the hallway and stairwell.  My intention is to line the entire length of the hallway with photos, land grants, education certificates, etc. of the two previous owners family members.  And, then I have a huge collection of my family's old old photographs. 

At the mouth of the stairway, there are 2 metal hangers bolted into the wall (left and right) carrying a 2 x 4 underneath supporting the the oriented strand board.

Above - here's a look at a portion of the wooden scaffold Jon built so we could work on the stairwell.  To work on the stairwell, we quickly install the 2 x 4 board into the metal hangers at the top of the stairs, and click in place the remaining puzzle piece that completes the scaffold. 

When we finish the walls in the upper stairwell, Mr. Kinnison (the crown molding wizard) will install the crown molding upstairs.  After the crown molding is installed, we'll dismantle the wooden scaffold in the stairwell and continue the wall repairs down the stairwell and into the foyer.