Goodbye Apartment, Hello Housework
This morning J will be turning in the keys to the apartment that we have called home since college - J has lived there the past 6 years and I there with him for the past 5. We grew quite settled into the place during that time but now, after a week of clearing, cleaning and patching, it is empty of our presence and back to being an anonymous, blank slate apartment.
And without skipping a beat we are now launching headlong into turning this strange and unfamiliar new house thing into our home. Our Phase 1 plan of attack is to first paint all the interior walls and then take up the carpet and refinish the original hardwood floors underneath in one big initial push before we move our furniture in and unpack our stuff.
Yesterday we got off to a great start by stripping the wallpaper off the walls. My glutton-for-punishment parents came down to help us for the day and between the four of us we managed to completely strip every inch of ugly wall paper. All it took was 2 jugs of fabric softener, a garden sprayer, a few box cutters and paint scrapers, and 7 solid hours of tedious manual labor.
We started around 11 and tackled the grayish-beige tweed-textured monstrosity in the hallway and the oh-so-charming print of big pink rose blossoms on pearlized white in the kitchen. Once those were out of the way we took a quick lunch break to refuel on quesadillas with chips and guac, and then it was back in the ring to duke it out with one more hallways section of tweed, a bedroom wall of flesh-toned floral print, and the two bathrooms. The master bathrooms yellow and rust striped paper pulled right off in big satisfying panels, while the fleshy beige grass-tuft paper in the hall bathroom proved to be the most difficult part of all. First there was the vinyl top layer, then there was the paper glue backing, and then there was the tissue thin layer of priming paper, and then there was bare, vulnerable drywall siding without any protective primer or paint between it and the icky sticky paper glue that we were wetting down and trying to scrape off of it. And it all came off in separate layers, to varying degrees, revealing a range of drywall conditions underneath, with every inch taking concerted elbow grease. But at the end of the day we emerged victorious, albeit with hands sticky and raw and sporting a few band-aids between them.
We had everything finished and mopped up sometime around 6 or so and then headed out to get some fresh air with a walk along the access road that runs along the hill behind the houses on our street. The sun was just going down, giving us a lovely auburn show over the bay and a peek at the wildlife creeping out into the twilight. Lots of deer, a pack of feral kitties, a skunk waddling slowly through the grass, turkey feathers, the smell of dry grass and open hills - all right out back from our little piece of land. It was just the thing to counteract the long day of glue residue. We ended the day with a mellow, late dinner out for Thai food before my folks headed out.
It was quite a full, productive, satisfying day. And it's just the beginning.
And without skipping a beat we are now launching headlong into turning this strange and unfamiliar new house thing into our home. Our Phase 1 plan of attack is to first paint all the interior walls and then take up the carpet and refinish the original hardwood floors underneath in one big initial push before we move our furniture in and unpack our stuff.
Yesterday we got off to a great start by stripping the wallpaper off the walls. My glutton-for-punishment parents came down to help us for the day and between the four of us we managed to completely strip every inch of ugly wall paper. All it took was 2 jugs of fabric softener, a garden sprayer, a few box cutters and paint scrapers, and 7 solid hours of tedious manual labor.
We started around 11 and tackled the grayish-beige tweed-textured monstrosity in the hallway and the oh-so-charming print of big pink rose blossoms on pearlized white in the kitchen. Once those were out of the way we took a quick lunch break to refuel on quesadillas with chips and guac, and then it was back in the ring to duke it out with one more hallways section of tweed, a bedroom wall of flesh-toned floral print, and the two bathrooms. The master bathrooms yellow and rust striped paper pulled right off in big satisfying panels, while the fleshy beige grass-tuft paper in the hall bathroom proved to be the most difficult part of all. First there was the vinyl top layer, then there was the paper glue backing, and then there was the tissue thin layer of priming paper, and then there was bare, vulnerable drywall siding without any protective primer or paint between it and the icky sticky paper glue that we were wetting down and trying to scrape off of it. And it all came off in separate layers, to varying degrees, revealing a range of drywall conditions underneath, with every inch taking concerted elbow grease. But at the end of the day we emerged victorious, albeit with hands sticky and raw and sporting a few band-aids between them.
We had everything finished and mopped up sometime around 6 or so and then headed out to get some fresh air with a walk along the access road that runs along the hill behind the houses on our street. The sun was just going down, giving us a lovely auburn show over the bay and a peek at the wildlife creeping out into the twilight. Lots of deer, a pack of feral kitties, a skunk waddling slowly through the grass, turkey feathers, the smell of dry grass and open hills - all right out back from our little piece of land. It was just the thing to counteract the long day of glue residue. We ended the day with a mellow, late dinner out for Thai food before my folks headed out.
It was quite a full, productive, satisfying day. And it's just the beginning.