Ever notice that when you start fixing up one problem in one room of your house, that you start to notice all the other problems too! You can sit and watch TV all winter long and not even notice those little things that "really should get done". Then spring comes along and all of a sudden, it's a major panic to get all those projects done.
When you live in a 100 year old house, you never know what you might find, so you are very skittish about digging too deep into walls, windows or floors. We finally got the new furnace in this last fall so I was feeling pretty good about updating other things. The wallpaper in the living room had slumped in the corners. That's another way of saying that the walls had not settled at the same levels over the years. You might not notice at the time, but yes, houses move. It started with a simple painting project and turned into this massive, ugly, all consuming, nasty, "I'll never do this again" type project.
This house has stood for over 100 years and I believe it will live on a lot longer than I will. And after all the climbing up and down ladders and pealing wallpaper and scraping paint, It's definitely in better shape than I am. You learn very quickly how out of shape your arms are when you start patching the ceiling. Then about the 50th time up and down the ladder, your legs start complaining too. The ceiling had cracked in places and those cracks were starting to drive me crazy. It looked more like a road map than a crack. There was only two options, repair the cracks or pull down the whole ceiling and re-plaster. I can repair cracks by myself, but I can't re-plaster, so repair it is. As long as I'm repairing the ceiling, I might as well repair the cracks in the walls too.
I've been at this for over 2 months now. My husband has learned how to dismantle the TV/Cable/DVD, etc. in less than 5 minutes. The hardest part of this project is motivating yourself to do it. Once I get started, I want to keep going until I get it done, but then something comes along where I have to stop and go to a real job or some such non-sense and then things sit.
It can take weeks to get back to it. My husband is in no hurry to do these jobs as he knows that there is no end to the list of projects. I guess that's what they call wisdom in old age. Unfortunately, it bothers me a whole lot more to see these projects go undone than it does him. He claims he has difficulty watching me work, but I don't see him having any difficulty in that at all.
Where are we at now? Well the 30 layers of wallpaper and paint have been scrapped off the walls, and the glue washed off. The walls were actually in amazing condition once all the paper and paint was gone. The ceiling cracks were repaired and two coats of new paint have been applied. One coat of paint is now on the walls (yes, my husband hates the color), but I love it! It still needs one more coat of paint and then I'm thinking I'm going to tear up the carpet and put down new wood floors....Does it never end?
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