The First Project

The dining room had wallpaper. Apparently wallpaper can be difficult to remove. It becomes exponentially more difficult with each additional layer. Our house was built in 1972. There were 4 layers of wallpaper in the dining room. Thus, wallpaper styles seem to have a shelf life of approximately 9 years. Peeling through the stratigraphy of our wallpaper was like a little tour through the past 3 decades of wallpaper technology and style. The top layer wasn't really all that obtrusive. Each subsequent example of wallpaper became more and more disturbing. I bet the bottom layer really made some people lose their appetites in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner.

Well, here's our initial attempt to remove this evil stuff. We tried it all: steamer, water, fabric softener, yelling at the wallpaper, DIF wallpaper remover, scoring, scraping. This first picture represents a couple hours of work. Suffice it to say we were ill-prepared. Our scrapers were awful and we had no idea what we were doing.

Just looking at this picture makes my scraping hand hurt. If anyone asks you to help them remove wallpaper (and you don't foresee yourself asking them to return the favor anytime soon) politely - and in words of your own choosing - tell them to shove off.

The more we worked on this job, the more we hated wallpaper...but also the work became easier. Matt's suggestion to "paint" the DIF on worked quite well and sped things up. The picture above shows most of the wallpaper removed. Sometimes Erika and I, in our wallpaper-removing excitement, would dig a little bit into the wallboard. To make sure the finished wall looked nice and smooth I spread joint compound over the rough patches. After it dried I sanded it all down so most of it looked smooth. You can see how excited we were to get rid of this stuff by the amount of joint compound now on the wall.


Finally, here's the near-finished product. Sure, it's only primer, but it's in a tint similar to what it will eventually look like. Erika and Mom/Lindley matched the color to one of our Ceramica plates. We removed the trim to see if it would be easier to paint it outside the room - we'll see if it helps!

So far this has been a nice, manageable job. It finally appears as if we are getting things done!

The Closing

Are 2 1/2 hour closings typical? Do lawyers usually put the buyer and seller in separate rooms and run hurriedly between conferences? Is it good when the sellers attorney says he thinks the title agent is "wrong?"

Disclaimer: our prior experience with closings is exactly 1. That closing (in New Hampshire) was fairly smooth. We all sat around a table, the seller brought her infant son, we signed some papers, a few checks were passed around and we left the meeting with a couple silver keys.

So the outcomes were the same. We left the closing with a few keys and the creeping realization that some mortgage company actually let us finance a couple hundred thousand dollars. It was almost like we got away with something...like at the end of The Usual Suspects when Verbal Kint slowly becomes Keyser Söze.

We drove to our new house and took it in. It looked bigger. There are projects, to be sure, not the least daunting of which will occur in the kitchen. But it seems manageable for some reason. After a few minutes alone, Matt (our friend and contractor) pulled up and we got to work with what would be done. My mom and Robert brought cold champagne and tortilla chips and guacamole (an excellent combination, by the way). Mike and Caitlin soon arrived, Mike with a housewarming gift of every power tool we'd need for the various projects detailed in a how-to book from the mother.

Sitting around - actually, standing, as we have no chairs yet - sipping champagne, looking around at that we change and what we leave...that's what made me enter this crazy world of blogging. And by the way, blogosphere is on my list of most hated words. I will not be using it.


So here it is!