Meanwhile...

Lest anyone think Mrs. Restoration and I have been slacking off these last eight weeks while the painters were scampering about outside, we've actually been working on all sorts of things indoors. These can be roughly divided into three projects: the downstairs kitchen, the downstairs living rooms, and the upstairs hallway and closet.

Well, maybe five projects. There's also the men's and ladies' restrooms, and the sprinkler system.

Oh, and the concrete wall. That makes six... unless we've forgotten something.

Let's start with the living room.

You may remember that Kathy started stripping the wallpaper from the three downstairs rooms more than a year ago. That was tedious work, and ever since then we've had bare plastered walls. The walls had never been painted, only papered, so removing the layers of wallpaper exposed the bare plaster underneath. It had held up remarkably well considering it's 120 years old and laid on a wood-frame house with no foundation. Sure, there were a few cracks here and there, but Kathy spackled and sanded them to a nice smooth finish. We'd gotten kind of used to the bare walls, although I'm sure visitors thought it looked funny.

Well, last week we finally put up the new wallpaper. (Okay, Kathy did it while I stood on the ladder.) We started with the front room; the two other rooms will come later. For amateur paperhangers, I think we did pretty well.

The walls may be smooth, but they sure aren't straight. That makes it tough to hang paper. The seams don't want to match, and the paper will tend to "clock" or rotate if you're not careful. We snapped a couple of plumb lines to keep things vertical, but there's really more art than science to aligning it on uneven walls.

It got especially tricky alongside the windows, where you've got a big 8-foot strip of wallpaper with a little L-shaped piece sticking out at the bottom that goes underneath the windowsill. Someone has to hold the top up while someone else tries to match the pattern on this little piece under the window. "Move it up a few inches. Okay, now to the right. A little more... a little more... Okay, there!" More than once I let go of the wallpaper too soon and it came down on top of us. Add a soundtrack and a little soft-focus camera work and I'm sure it would have made a cute movie.