When The Cat's Away

As I previously mentioned, K. went away for a couple days this weekend leaving me here in Smallville to work on the house. So, other than the brief time spent watching the parade yesterday, I spent my holiday weekend commemorating those men and women who have given their lives for our country by tearing down a shed and painting a foyer. You don't get much more patriotic than that.

First, the foyer. Yes, it has been nearly a year since we painted the bottom half of the foyer and promised to paint the top half "shortly", but what can I say -- we are procrastinators. (Incidentally, if you think that's bad then you don't want to know that the door I removed as the very first Revivalizing project on the day after we bought the house is still sitting in exactly the same spot that we put it on that day in what is now the laundry room. And we have no intentions of moving it elsewhere anytime soon. THAT'S how procrastinatory we are).

So right after K. left for her weekend in the city, I grabbed my spray bottle and my scraper and I started scraping the wallpaper off the top of the stairs. Goodbye, blue flowers! We won't miss you at all! I then pulled out the plaster washers and the drill and the plaster and started patching up the wall, as it really wasn't in very good shape (the previous photo is a good indicator of the shape the wall was in, though it is actually from the lower half of the foyer). Luckily, I have become an old pro at making cracked plaster look somewhat passable (although still far from good -- but that's what hanging big pieces of art over it is for, right?) so this didn't take so long and I could get on to the fun part: priming and painting!









(Again, I apologize for the absence of photos from the first part of the adventure, but for some reason K. thought that taking pictures of old friends who she hasn't seen in a decade was more important than sharing with you all yet another set of photos of plaster and pulling down wallpaper. Go figure.)

Stay tuned for photos of the finished product, coming soon to a blog near you.

At the various points over the weekend where I was waiting for plaster or primer to dry or waiting for K. to return with the car so I could stock up on supplies, I worked on the shed. And while there is still a good deal of work to do both in getting the last of the roof off as well as making it into a nice space of some sort, I did make some good progress, as over the weekend it went from this:



to this:



I wish I could say that there was some easy and fun technique that I used to pry those pieces off, but alas it was just a lot of time with me, a hammer, a crowbar, and a ladder. And lots of pounding and prying. And now I am sore in my arms and shoulders and in muscles that I haven't known existed since we pulled up the carpet last summer. Oh, and of course Memorial Day Weekend means the beginning of summer, which the weather here took quite literally as the highs jumped from the 70's to 90 or so just in time for me to spend all day in the sun working on the roof. Oh joy.