I've been plastered for two weeks!

I have not been imbibing but I am having to recover from the plastering I have been doing. My hands have been aching and going numb again. I wanted these pictures in the opposite order. Oh well.... This is the foyer of our house. I don't really have a good "before" picture of it. We have decided that rebuilding is definitely harder and more time-consuming than building new. All of the exterior walls, which in this room includes the two walls you can see in this photo, are solid masonry. There are 3 layers of brick with a layer of plaster on the inside of the house. When we purchased the house last spring, every wall had some cracks, holes, and missing plaster. We have replaced some of the lathe and plaster interior walls with sheetrock. But in the foyer, we just plastered....and plastered.....and plastered. Nearly a month ago, I spent a couple of days refinishing the woodwork of the stairs, up to the first landing. For the last two weeks I have been repairing and smoothing the walls and ceiling. Russ, fortunately, did the finish design on the ceiling. The texture doesn't come out in the pictures but it's a swirl pattern created with a stiff brush, spackle, and lots of heavy wrist work. We used today's replacement for plaster. You mix it with water to the desired consistency then work like crazy to use it up before the chemical reaction takes place that hardens it like rock! So this is a focus on the wall picture, now ready for painting. And..............................................
this is actually from the landing going up but the rest of the foyer basically looked like this. In a couple of weeks we'll paint and I'll post pictures of the finished foyer.