Weekend Three - Hidden Closets, Endless Nails

It's been another productive weekend. It never ceases to amaze me, the amount of things we're able to accomplish each weekend. This weekend's activities were a bit of a bore to me. And just when I thought the work couldn't get any more depressing, the weekend's monotonous activities were redeemed through a quick coat of primer!

This weekend we peeled wallpaper...it was slow and tedious and didn't do anything at all to improve the look of the place...

We also removed the strange assortment of wall boards and plaster from the kitchen walls, which was a very dusty and dirty undertaking. But I do like the finished look...what do you think? Now we can run new electrical and put up nice, new, clean sheetrock.

Then we pulled nails around every door frame, window, corner, and crevice. Throughout the entire house was a parade of a million nails where trim used to be. All the nails needed to be pulled before we could do anything with the walls. I pulled nails by myself for two hours on Friday morning and wanted to die from boredom. I quickly decided that nail pulling was a team sport and decided to do something I liked...paint!

On Friday afternoon we finished painting the exterior of the house. Remember when I said that if I was lucky my mom would finish the painting? Well, she practically did. All that was left to paint was half of the back. Easy peasey. Although it was a little depressing making the back of the house look all shiney and new, because no one is EVER going to notice the back. There is literally no back yard and there are trees covering up the entirety of the back of the house. But we did it, and it's done! And I must say, the entire house looks pretty great. Now if only we could get our roofer out here...he promised it'd be done by the end of October...I'm counting on it! 

We cleaned out the cellar and the back porch. This was another really gross and dirty job, but the cellar looks as good as a dark and dirty cellar could, and the back porch is decluttered and ready for us to make it look good when we get a spare weekend. We collected this pile of junk, as well as a full truckload of junk...

The cleaned-out backporch...

On Saturday morning we took three trips to the dump to get rid of the above garbage, then pulled nails and staples all morning. Do you see the picture below of the ceiling? Those boards have staples all along them, and we had to pull each and every one so that we can put up sheetrock. I'm sure you can imagine how fun that was. But we removed every nail and every staple and every piece of trim that we overlooked last week, and NOW we are finally ready to start improving this pile of rubble.

You know the saying, "it always looks worse before it gets better"? Well, this house is literal proof of that. After three weeks of demolition and dirtiness, I was beginnging to think it would never get better. The house looks absolutely terrible!? However, on Saturday afternoon we finally decided that we were at a point where we could at least put a quick coat of primer on the walls. Hallelujah! I love to paint, and it was amazing how just one quick coat of primer lightened the place up and gave me hope that this project wasn't a lost cause after all.

The pantry and dining nook...

 a sample of the upstairs bedrooms...

After doing some brainstorming with friends and co-workers this past week, we decided to take a different approach to our paneled wall situation. We have primed the top half of the paneling and will be filling the cracks in with mud and spraying on some texture (with a texture gun). This will be much more affordable and easier than wallpapering the top half, and as far as I'm concerned, is a much better solution anyway.

Walls have to do two things for me.

#1: I have to be able to paint them as many times as I want to; and

#2: I have to be able to patch a hole in the wall when I redecorate and change the location of my pictures, which I do often.

With plain, wood paneling you can do neither activity very successfully. With paintable wallpaper you can paint it, but you can't patch a hole successfully. So, I'm thinking this mudding and texturing solution is quite perfect. What do you think?  Then, of course, we will put up white beadboard along the bottom half of the paneling to cover up the electrical re-wiring runs.

My mom discovered a few exciting things about the house this week. Upstairs, all the bedrooms are painfully small, however, the smallest rooms definitely got a bit larger this week, as she found entire walk-in closets in each corner of the house that had previously been walled off completely!? Why these closets were walled off is a mystery to us. I thought we might at least find a dead body in one of the areas!? Or a stash of cash!? Or at the very least unleash a ghost!? But to no avail. All we've found is precious, empty space. Space that we will be accessing and using. Which is very exciting! This means we can get rid of the added-on closets in those rooms, creating a lot more space in each room. Awesome!

This is the closet in the master bedroom...it is a big closet, and it was easy to uncover the existing doorway leading into it. And isn't that wallpaper lovely? 

This is the closet at the top of the stairs. The original doorway went into the bathroom, but we'll be making a door right here at the top of the stairs, so this can be a linen closet, or a little storage room, or both!?

(There is one more hidden closet in a bedroom not pictured, but you get the idea...)

At this point we really are ready to start putting things back together by mudding and sheetrocking and painting, but first we have to wait for our electrician to start working on things. I have a feeling our progress may be stalled by him sometime in the next few weeks. We shall see. But one thing is for sure, at the top of my list of to-do's this week is to buy my mom a cute, new work hat so that she can retire her sweet bandana.

Have I mentioned that I love my mom yet?? Cause I really, really do!!!