I need to find my card reader because I have got to resize the pictures of the DoA charity auction dolls and get those started… very pretty Elfdoll boys, please be watching! :)
I think that in the house, I’d like to make a few changes to things that either bother me or are “easy.” This would be good because it would sort of be empowering. One of the “easy” fixes that had been sounding attractive was to strip the wallpaper in the dining room and repaint. The dining room wallpaper is hideous. Most of the walls are covered in a generic mottled beige/gold/greenish… but two of the walls seem to randomly have a very 60’s verging-on-neon yellow, orange and green flower paper. The wallpaper where the dining room and living room doorways meet was peeling a bit, so I pulled it back a little to see the condition of the wall underneath. To my surprise, it seemed as though the wallpaper on the dining room wall is not in fact wallpaper, but carboard liner sheet. When I look online, a cursory search tells me that a lot of houses built between 1900-1920 have smooth cardboard wallpaper that was intended to mask irregularities to the plaster wall beneath… many times, the irregularities were not the sort of thing to require such a permanent “fix,” but in some cases the wallpaper actually is structural. As we look closer, it seem that the less offense of the two (the cardboard backed stuff) may be the original wallpaper from when the house was built in 1920… and water damage near the window led to the prior owners covering over damaged areas with the horrific neon in a later era. (The addition of an enclosed porch would have solved the problem of additional water damage as well.)
The new plan for the dining room is to remove the newer, more offensive wallpaper, but to leave the cardboard covering. Then we’ll prime everything with some good, heavy, opaque primer. Then we’ll fill in any little divots or lines between the cardboard panels and sand to a smooth surface. Then we’ll likely prime again, then paint the room.
Really, aside from pulling up the carpet and replacing the light fixture, there isn’t much to be done in the dining room.
The other “action item” is to redo the linoleum on the kitchen floor. It’s not dirty, but it is yellowed from the sun and stained in some areas… it is very, very old. I really hate mungy linoleum. The kitchen has relatively low square footage, and putting down linoleum is something that Mandy and I can do ourselves, so it wouldn’t be too expensive but would make a big difference.
Tired… and sneezy. I’m waiting for it to be 11 so I can go to bed without feeling like too much of a loser…
