that brown house

i’ve been pretty frazzled the past week. i have a fairly significant deadline creeping up on me at work that is demanding more attention than i want to devote to it, i’ve been taking long “lunches” to meet with contractors at the house, and i still need to attend to my responsibilities toward my mother…and she’s been extra moody lately because so much of my attention has been devoted elsewhere. this all came to a head saturday morning when she made a few remarks that lead to our whole little household having hurt feelings.

i was still quite emotional when we got to the house, so instead of just sticking with our plan of priming the kitchen walls, i started listing all the flaws in our plan and griping that covering the counters and cabinets with plastic, etc. would probably be in the electrician’s way (since he had started on the work he is doing for the kitchen, but didn’t seem to be done in there). i just needed to vent, but somehow my venting lead to a decision to paint the dining room. the dining room, like the kitchen and, well, much of the house, has painted over wallpaper, but we had previously discussed leaving it for the time being and just painting over the ivory to get some color in the room (most of the room is woodwork painted white, which we are currently leaving that way). so eric went to buy the paint (dockside blue) while i stayed behind to start masking the walls. i started with the fireplace mantle. the wallpaper overlapped the mantle and had these little jagged edges, so i started trying to “clean up” the joint, then i started picking at little edges of wallpaper above the window, and then i accidentally-intentionally ripped off some wallpaper.

so instead of making anything look better, we spent saturday stripping dining room wallpaper and making the room look worse! the kicker is how many layers of wallcovering we discovered: paint, then wallpaper, then at least two more colors of paint, then two layers of wallpapers (one an old textured wallpaper), then a layer of some sort of dusty plaster (?) coating, then scarlet red paint, then the plaster. wow. in some areas we went down through all the layers, but mostly we just removed the top layer of (poorly applied) wallpaper and paint. we washed the walls with tsp and applied fiberglass tape and joint compound to a few cracks before calling it a day.

today we had afternoon plans, so there wasn’t enough time for patching and sanding the dining room walls or priming the kitchen, so we treated ourselves to our first dose of color: we painted the ceiling between the box beams! even though it will probably need a second coat, it was so very exciting to do something that when we were done resembled what it should/will look like completed! i think we really needed that…it’s made me feel much better, at least.