Because What Would I Do With All The Free Time?

I am happy to report that we kicked major butt over the weekend and managed to cross a lot of things off the Home To Do List, including a lot of electrical and plumbing work. (Thanks Brian!)Paint makes things pretty but if you have no lights to see it, what's the point?

On my DUNZO! list I can add Maddy's room and her bathroom. Her bedroom looks adorable - we painted three of the four walls green, with a pink wall behind her bed. Her turquoise/pink/brown bedding looks fabulous in there as well.

Her bathroom turned out just a bit pinker than the paint sample, but it's not as bright as her room. It's more a shell pink, just a little darker. But still lovely.

The kitchen wallpaper is history (thanks Lynn!) and I painted part of it last night, just to see how the paint is going to look. Maddy said it looks good, so that will be finished up tonight. One part is going to be difficult - I have staggered cabinets with crown molding in the corner, and I can barely reach the wall behind them. I'm going to have to use my square paint pad and a lot of patience to avoid nicking the ceiling, because of course you can see up there. Gah.

Now, to explain the title of today's missive - I stripped the top layer of the pink and white candy-striped-retina- searing wallpaper with floral border on Sunday night, thinking I'd strip the backing paper Monday night. Due to the weather yesterday, Maddy's school was closed. I was glad to get an extra full day to finish it and possibly even get it painted a day ahead of schedule. Could I really truly be this lucky?

As I was stripping off the backing paper, I noticed a faint outline of the floral border underneath it. Could it possibly be...nah, it couldn't...could it? Who does that? Well, they did. Yep, you guessed it, I discovered ANOTHER layer of the border paper. Which had been painted over with primer. What. The. Hell? (Actually, hell was probably the only obscenity that wasn't screamed when I discovered that).

Here's my theory on how this happened - the couple who built this house decided that the wife could decorate the master bedroom and bath (which would explain the the pink carpet, sink and wallpaper). The husband, having tolerated all the pink he could handle, saw the bathroom walls and said "no more pink flowers! I have to pee in here too!" The wife got huffy and said "If you don't like it, you take it down!" Then she stormed out and went shopping for more pink accessories.

The husband, seeing his chance, painted over the border while she was gone. When she came home and saw what he had done, she decided to hire a decorator to hang full length pink striped wallpaper, and, to add insult to injury, added the same border on top of the wallpaper, just to spite him.

When the husband came home, he saw the bathroom walls, went blind, and decided it didn't matter what was on the walls, as he could no longer see.

At least that's the scenario I came up with while steaming that *&^% off the wall. For THREE HOURS! The upside is that my complexion will be glowing from the moisture, and I am becoming a pro at wallpaper removal and I will not have to spackle chunks of drywall this time.

Hey, I take my victories where I can.