After pulling up that carpet all other progress seems so slow because there just isn't as much of a dramatic change as quickly. But we are making progress. It often feels like 2 steps forward, 1 step back, but we're moving.
Each of the three of us who can walk have taken turns pulling staples out of the floor when we had little bits and pieces of time and I spent an hour or so pulling up tack strips one day from half of the dining room. Joe has been over at the house for the last 3 hours working on tack strips so I am excited to see how far he has gotten. (Update: he just got home and finished ALL the rest of the tack strips! I cannot tell you how excited I am by this.) But while all of those steps absolutely have to happen, they don't have the same visible reward as pulling up the green carpet did. Also, while the floor looked great compared to what we were anticipating, that initial glow is wearing off (and the literal dust is clearing) and I now see all the imperfections. And because we are in limbo on what to do about sealing/protecting the floor (I refuse to sand them all the way down and re-stain given how good of shape they are in but the hardwood flooring contractor we had out thinks someone used wax on sections at some point which apparently makes it impossible to have them just buffed and coated) I am constantly paranoid about whether a scratch is something we've done or whether it was always there and I just hadn't noticed.
The office is the only room that is finished. Well, even that room isn't what I had planned because I had planned to paint the wood paneling that goes around the window white, but it may have to stay wood. But we are really happy with how it turned out.
Nicholas helped prime the second wall and he actually did a phenomenal job but it was very stressful for me. He is 5 and so still knocks over cups of milk at the table and he was working with paint and open buckets of paint in a room with wood baseboards and floors. And goodness knows that I inevitably get paint on doors and ceilings so I was waiting for the time he made a mess. But he didn't.
I ended up doing two coats of paint after the primer. It was like 95% after the first coat and I probably could have gotten away with it, but I would have seen all the imperfections and gone insane.
Joe and I started stripping wallpaper on Wednesday and got halfway through Elizabeth's room (the smallest room--not counting bathrooms--in the entire house). We started with the vinegar and fabric softener suggestions we'd been given and read about and the paper was coming off and in ways that basically matched what we expected from what we'd heard (little bits and pieces, with a lot of scraping).
And so we were just plugging along. And then after an hour this is what we had accomplished:
And we started doing the math and realized that at that rate we'd still be working on Elizabeth's room when it was time to move in. So we decided to try the chemical spray I'd bought since it was sitting there but with the plan of going back to Home Depot after lunch and renting a steamer. But the spray made a big difference and so we decided to keep going with it. Occasionally we got a big strip, although there was still quite a bit of scraping. So after another hour and a half we had finished the first (and smallest) wall.
But that progress seemed very comparable to what we had seen in youtube videos of people using a steamer, so there didn't seem to be any reason to go rent the steamer. After lunch Joe switched to working on the basement floor (I didn't take pictures, but apparently the water was black after he mopped!) while I went back to the wallpaper. And a miracle happened:
I'm hoping that I figured out the trick and it wasn't a fluke of that one wall. We will see tomorrow when we start on another interior wall. For the record, what I did on that wall was score a sheet with the paper tiger, spray on the gel, rub the gel in (with chemical resistant gloves on because even I have some limits) in a circular motion, peel up the top corner of a sheet with the putty knife, pull gently all along the top of the sheet so that the entire sheet was released at the top, and then pull slowly down, the entire sheet at once (pulling each side a little and then the middle. Pulling slowly there was occasionally a place that caught or where the bottom paper layer started to rip and the trick was to stop immediately and use the putty knife to get that spot so that the sheet could continue to be pulled as a whole. It actually makes sense why this would work so much better than what we had been doing, but I spent hours reading blogs and forums and watching videos and no one else said anything about rubbing the gel in or pulling the sheet as a whole, so I am still worried it was a random easy wall. We shall see tomorrow. But, regardless, we are so lucky because they had stripped off the 1960s wallpaper (see the yellow and orange flowers below) when they put this wallpaper up (we assume in the 1980s) and the walls are plaster. I have such respect for the previous owners!
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