Home Projects - Update #1

Yay! We finally started on the guest room upstairs and the laundry room! It's one of those projects that I totally want to have done while still trying to ignore it. The thoughts of it filled me with dread. Both rooms had this hideous wall paper border that needed to come down. I use the word "room" very loosely in reference to the laundry area, mind you. It's not really a room at all. It's more of a back door entry that someone through the years tried to see just how much stuff they could cram into it while still being able to walk. For all the things that I adore about my home, this just isn't one of them. Let me see if I can paint you a picture. When you walk in the back door - there are 3 steps up to a landing that turns and continues upstairs. The bottom 3 steps butt up next to the door casing. The door sits right up against the wall that separates it from the kitchen. So there is no space there. In this very small area we have a nasty monstrosity that I like to call the furnace. I have thought and thought about the furnace. There is really no solution that we can come up with to hide the ugly thing. So, we will get to look at it in all of it's mechanical glory until the day we decide to take on some major renovations. In this laundry room (again, very loosely) there are the appliances that have bestowed upon it it's name. The washing machine is on the wall that backs up to the kitchen. The dryer is tucked in under the stairs. That's fun! I can't tell you the times that I've hit my head while doing laundry. Maybe one day it will knock some sense in me! LOL! And you can't forget the laundry hampers that hold dirty clothes, a basket intended to corral the shoes that always escape and try to trip me. And there is also the trash can. So, as you can see this is a FUN room. Anyway, taking down the border is the part I kept dragging my feet on. We had started to take it down once before in a cubby upstairs and the stuff wasn't wanting to budge. I just knew it was going to be a bear.

Yesterday all 3 of us in my clan marched upstairs with our arsenal of paper removing weapons in hand. We had determination. We had the right equipment. We had each other as reinforcements. It went surprisingly quick with all 3 of us working together. We had both areas stripped down in an hour and a half. Funny thing is - the only really stubborn area was the one that we had started on before. I wouldn't have waited nearly so long if we had started somewhere else the first time. Isn't that usually how it goes?

There are some places in the walls that need to be patched and sanded and then we can start painting. That should go really quick. We have gotten the painting part down to a science. I'll post pictures as we progress with our make-overs. I have added a couple so you can see what we were dealing with. SO GROSS!

These two pictures are at the top of the stairs. Could it BE more disgusting?

These two lovely shots are of the laundry room. Notice how it still looks like a border is up due to the nastiness of the walls? NICE. Also, you can see here what I was saying about the door butting right up on the kitchen wall. I'm taking the picture from the landing.

After living with this mess for almost a year - I'm excited about the prospects of clean walls and fresh paint. It's going to be a busy work week here - but a very rewarding one.

Catch ya later.

Pam