Wallpaper Free Zone

It's official, we live in a wallpaper free home, and it only took 2 years and 3 months to do it! Most of the wallpaper removal took place in the first few months of owning our home, but the pesky polka dotted elephants did not want to vacate the premises.

The brilliant previous owners decided that instead of removing their elephant friends, they should put another, indistinguishable, wall paper border over them, and then, when tired of said indistinguishable border, paint over both layers of wallpaper. Brute force removed about 75% of this wallpaper. I basically discovered that if I jab the scraper below the paint, I can peel back the paint and both layers of wallpaper all the way down to the original wall texture. Unfortunately though, this did not work for all of it, and the remaining 25% was widdled away miniscule bit by minuscule bit. Now I am a woman who is motivated by progress and results, and this, having extremely slow progress and small results, lead to extremely low motivation, and thus, it remained 75% done for a very, very long time. That's where this comes in...

This beauty is a clothes steamer a friend purchased for $5 at a garage sale and no longer wanted. It was suggested that perhaps this would help us, and boy did it! That sucker got so hot the paint turned to a weird elastic-like putty that could be peeled off, making the wallpaper below much easier to remove. In just a few days, the two of us took those polka dotted elephants from the endangered species list to the extinct list. Say hello to the Dodo Bird polka dotted elephants!

Since then, Derek took it a step further and smoothed out the walls to prepare them for texture and paint...

With step one of one major project completed, we got to thinking about our other projects. You see, Derek can be a little bit... unfocused. He comes home and if he's got time and is feeling well, he just picks a project and gets to work. That's all fine and dandy, except sometimes the projects he picks aren't really the projects that should have priority. For example, we bought paint 2 years ago, but have only painted the living room, and we still have bare drywall ceilings after scraping off the popcorn. These are priority projects. Derek's latest project is custom closets... not exactly the top of the priority list. So, we decided to sit down and make a list of everything that needed to be done. We used the home inspection report, and a walk around the house as a guide. Then we took all those things and prioritized it. The result, is the most expensive and exhausting list in the history of the world...

Needless to say, our foreclosure home is far from making the cover of Better Homes and Gardens. Little by little, though, it will get there. I may be 97 before it happens, but one day, this list will be complete.