Meanwhile...

Maybe we have short attention spans. Maybe we're just masochists. Maybe it's both.

At the same time that Kathy and I are beating ourselves up tiling the 3rd-floor bathroom, Kathy's also downstairs stripping the wallpaper off the ground-floor dining room. Just thinking of the two flights of stairs in between those makes me tired.

Anyway, she decided the "bordello red" wallpaper had to go. Actually, the wallpaper itself isn't red; it's a floral pattern that's been painted over, as you can kind of see here. It isn't original, either; we think it was probably applied by the Leitzingers, who ran a restaurant here in the 1990s. Then someone else (perhaps Robert Kincaid?) painted over it. At any rate, all three ground-floor rooms are the same shade of red, and we're tired of it.

Kathy's got a two-step process: she soaks the painted wallpaper and strips it off with a kitchen spatula, then she soaks the wall again and strips off the adhesive backing paper. It would be great if the wallpaper came off in huge strips, but alas, it tears off in little confetti-like pieces. Kathy is a patient woman.

Now that the walls are almost completely bare, the room doesn't seem so dark. It's also exposed the underlying plaster, which is in surprisingly good shape. For being 120 years old, it's only got a few small cracks and holes, but nothing major.

The bare plaster, peeling wallpaper, and slightly damp smell also give the room a kind of dilapidated, haunted house feeling to it. If the whole house had looked like this two years ago, I'm not sure we would have moved in. But knowing this is temporary and that we'll have a cleaner, brighter room soon make it worthwhile. Especially since I'm not doing the work!