Living Situation

You may be questioning what N's living situation is at this point in time. Well, since we were dumping so much money into Foo, and paying a mortgage on Foo, I asked my roommate if it would be alright if N lived with us for a month while we were getting Foo in a livable state. Thank god for my roomie, as he graciously said yes!! He was such a lifesaver, and a great person for allowing N to live with us, and I will be forever grateful. Mind you, I lived in an incredible apartment overlooking the city and mountains (see below).

N moved in with me for the month of November, and believe me, it was tough going from a fully furnished and working penthouse apartment to Foo. I would not move into Foo until July of 2008, however N moved into Foo in December 2007 with the master bedroom completed. No working bathroom, or kitchen, or living room, or dining room, or 2nd bedroom or laundry room... He is such a trouper. I have to say, love makes you do crazy things... and in this case, I moved from this apartment to Foo. What can I say, N is an amazing man!

Wallpaper... layers and layers of wall paper.

A week passes. The carpet is out, the base boards are gone, and the dog piss smell has finally dissipated. "Time to work on the master bedroom" N says to me. Looking in our master bedroom, I don't know what we are remodeling. It has 4 walls, a ceiling, a random door to the kitchen, a random window into the lodge, and a door. The walls could certainly be cleaned and re-painted, but I am not sure what else needs to be done. And then I look closer.

The wall with the lodge window has the most heinous wall paper I have ever seen. And when I say absolutely HEINOUS, I mean, paisley wall paper with olive green coloring, over light pink floral print, over baby blue robins... the staggering amounts of awful decorating choices was almost overwhelming. N tells me that I am going to start stripping off the wall paper, and he will be working on the floors in the living room/dining room.

Armed with wallpaper solvent, a mask, gloves, and a knife, I start to go at it. Spray the wall, wait 5 minutes, scrape, and... nothing. As much as I am scraping and scraping, these layers upon layers of wall paper do not want to budge. I get a corner here, a rip there, but after an hour and a half, I get fed up and frustrated. N tells me that I just need to scrape harder. HARDER?? I can't even lift my right arm, as it is SO SORE from attempting to remove this awful decor. At this point, I want to punch the wall, or punch N. The odd are really 50:50 as to who will feel the wrath of my pain and frustration. Instead of lashing out, I decide that I will take N's advise, and scrape harder. With one fail swoop, I scrape so hard that I take off not only the 10 layers of wallpaper, I also take off 1/2 of the plaster from the wall.

"Oops" squeaks out of my mouth. N comes in the room to see what has happened. He takes a look at the wall, takes a look at me, and says "Screw it, we will take the whole wall down!" Huh? Take the wall down? Oh wait, thats right, this is Foo we are talking about. The "start one project, create 3 more" house. Ok. So, now, after 2 hours of working on the wall paper, we now decide to demo all of the walls in the master bedroom. This means that all the plaster and lath has to go, and a day of labor is wasted. Again, I am not sure what I have gotten myself into, but I say OK.

We decide to call it a day, and will come back on a weeknight to begin demolition of the walls.