Wallpapering War Stories

or as a friend subtitled it, "The Glue always wins."

When we were looking for a house I kept describing this as "the house with the palm tree wallpaper." The owners were from Savannah and apparently quite homesick. Maybe plastering the house with palm trees made them feel more at home. There were palm trees in the master bathroom, palm trees in the hall bathroom, lots and lots of palm trees in the dining room...

And there still are.

I am the least girly of girls. My mother reupholstered furniture and sewed new pillows for each season. The decorating (and the do-it-yourself) gene skipped a generation. I don't decorate rooms; I inhabit them. I am more interested in comfort than style.

However, I hate wallpaper in general and the red palm tree wallpaper in the hall bathroom in particular. I've heard so many horror stories about wallpaper over the years that here I am, seven years later, still living in a house with wallpaper in 3 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms and the dining room.

Amanda is about to turn 13. I've decided that it is unfair to keep a teenage girl (in a wheelchair) in a room where roller skates, baseballs and footballs circle the ceiling. So, the other day I grabbed a corner of the hideous border and pulled. Ooh! Success.  A long, ugly strip of wall paper curled away from the wall. I pulled again... an even longer strip ripped off this time. I was in paper stripping Heaven. I pulled and ripped for half an hour until all of the ugly stuff was down.

Well, almost all.

I was so proud that I dragged one of Danielle's friend's mothers into the room to show off my handiwork. I didn't realize that I had to get the white paper backing off as well until she calmly offered me her steamer to remove the rest. Oh crud.

I made a pilgrimage to local Lowe's where the clerk cheerfully informed me that I would need a scoring tool, Piranha wallpaper remover spray, a wallpaper shaver and a special sponge with a paste scrubber.  Total cost: approximately $25.00.  Okay, I had the tools. Time to go attack that ugly off-white paper.

It was fun. I made a few mistakes the first time (note to self: next time start in a corner that you can't see from the rest of the room.) Rolling the scoring tool around made a wonderful noise. I felt empowered as I watched it punch rows and swirls of tiny holes in that persistent paper backing. I sprayed the spray until the paper turned brown and the liquid ran down the walls. Then, my personal favorite, I shaved it off. It peeled off in pieces like wet felt. They fell to the floor in clumps at the base of my 6 foot ladder. I was back in Heaven.

Four hours and a few gouges later the silly white paper was lying in damp piles on the floor. Next horrifying revelation: the paint under the border doesn't  match the rest of the walls.

Crap. Now I'm going to have to paint.

The Assessor Only Rings Once…

Or, Scoop & Hide: the Second Installment of My Saga of Domestic Ineptitude

Honestly, I didn’t expect to be writing this so soon after the first installment. I thought I’d have a little time to hide my secret shame. But fate sometimes takes some funny turns –and  this one was too funny not to relate.

This afternoon around 2:00 PM Kevin called from work and casually mentioned that a Real Estate Appraiser would be coming by around 3:00 PM. “Why,’ you are probably wondering.

Well, we all react to stress differently but a common element is the need to take control of some part of your life. So, when Amanda got hurt I threw myself compulsively into this blog. Kevin decided to refinance the house. Rates are low, our credit score is good and, in all honesty we are probably facing some major medical and remodeling costs to accommodate Amanda post-accident.

With my head buried deep in Blog Land I didn’t realize that the refinance had moved along so quickly. Having spent the morning at the doctor’s with Amanda rather than making beds and doing dishes the house was in even worse shape than normal.

No worries. I resorted to my tried and true house cleaning secret – The Scoop & Hide. One of my favorite things about this house is the 6’ by 12’ walk-in closet in my bedroom. After getting off the phone with Kevin I literally ran around the main floor, grabbing stray shoes, books, backpacks, papers, clothing and toys and tossing them in to this lovely, huge closet.

Viola!   The scoop and hide was complete. I pulled out the Shark Floor & Carpet Sweeper and ran it over all of the rugs and hardwood floors. I rinsed the dishes and stuck them will-nilly into the dishwasher then wiped off the kitchen counter. I was about to tackle the rooms in the basement when…

Ding Dong

“Mom”, said Danielle. “There’s a guy at the door with a huge tape measure and a camera.”

“Huh? A camera? Oh shit. Oh, well at least the main floor looks okay,” I thought.

I answered the door and invited the man inside. He gave me a slightly strange look so I immediately started to apologize for the chalk and toys littering the front porch. “Oh, sorry, the kids are home for the summer and I’m trying to balance my older daughter’s recovery with the younger one's desire to play outside. I meant to get her toys off the steps before you got here.”

He smiled and came in. He walked through the house, measuring each room and photographing it. I felt pretty smug until he opened The Closet. I just had to laugh and say, “Normally I wouldn’t let even my closest friends look in my closets…” He took a picture if the  closet, crammed full of clutter then moved on to the basement. I didn’t even bother to follow him down there. I figured, “At least the closets down there are clean.” (Of course that’s only because the floor was knee deep in toys.) Fifteen minutes later he came back upstairs and said goodbye.

It was only when I walked him to the door that I realized there was a dead mouse on the front steps. No wonder he looked at me so weird when I said I hadn’t picked up my child’s toys!

I Hate to Iron

The First installment of My Saga of Domestic Ineptitude

Some of my friends grew up at the knees of domestic divas, the unsung Martha Stewarts of their generation. I did not. Other moms baked their own bread and sewed their own clothes before anyone realized that being a homemaker could be marketed.  My mother routinely burned food and passed it off as our “Minimum Daily Requirement of Charcoal”, just like we had a MDR for vitamins. My brother once wrote a school essay entitled, “Morning at My House.” Apparently it started with “I come downstairs and smell the burnt toast…”

Mom didn’t wash dirty dishes immediately; she hid them in the oven. Needless to say, she didn’t bake. She hated to vacuum. When we were in preschool she paid me or my brother 5 cents to vacuum the entire downstairs.  When I complained about the poor wages later in life she said “I got what I paid for.” I never saw her dust. I was 14 before I realized that other people dusted their homes.

My mother, however, DID do laundry. She was almost compulsive about it. When we were very young we had a washing machine but no dryer. I remember laundry hanging out on a square clothes line in the summer and from the rafters in the basement in the winter. And, she loved to iron. She ironed everything from our sheets to my father’s boxers.  She had a frosted glass spray bottled filled with scented water. She would spray the clothes and then roll them carefully. One by one she would unroll the damp item and iron it, then carefully fold or hang it with all of the buttons buttoned, the zippers zipped and the snaps snapped.

I toss clean laundry on the floor of the laundry room. Dirty laundry is typically on the bedroom floors, so we can tell it apart from the clean stuff.  One of the flaws with this “system” is that our clothes are always wrinkled. I once had a neighbor tell me that she’d rather send her kids to school without breakfast than wearing wrinkled clothes. I guess we all have different ideas of good parenting…

I own an iron and even an ironing board. I bought them for my mother when she came to visit.  Kevin gave up on the possibility of me actually ironing a long time ago and takes anything he wears to work to the drycleaners. As for me and the girls, well… I have a few tricks. Like my mother, I own a bottle of scented water. Unlike my mother I just spray the clothes and toss them a back into the dryer. If there isn’t time for that I spray them with Downy Wrinkle Releaser and hope. In really extreme situations I’ve been known to straighten hems using my flat iron. (Finally, a use for the beauty products I buy and never use!)

Sometimes I feel a tiny pang of guilt when I drop the girls off at school and see all of the other children neatly pressed.  And then I think smugly, “at least mine have had a good breakfast…”

DDIY ~ Don’t Do It Yourself

Hon,

You are a smart man.

You are a strong man.

You are a handsome man.

You aren’t a handyman.

Hire someone else to do this, please!

Kevin and I have a long history of semi-disastrous Do It Yourself projects.  I think it’s because we think we’re smart – or maybe we’re just cheap. Both of us, despite years of proof to the contrary, believe that we can do anything that we can read about.

Take this weekend, for instance. Our 23^rd anniversary started with an eerie smell emanating from the basement bathroom. Naturally, we both thought perhaps there was a clog in the toilet. Plunging resulted in sewage seeping up through the bathtub drain… eeeewww.

Our next logical thought was that the septic tank needed to be pumped. We’ve had a rainy spring and it’s been five years since we’d had it done. Mr. Router happily obliged us with a $400.00 house call. Goodbye, anniversary gifts, baby sitter & dinner at an upscale restaurant.

Then Mr. Router gave us the bad news. The septic tank wasn’t the problem – the ejector pump needed to be replaced. Estimate:  $1, 200.00 more… Goodbye, ever eating out again.

So, what do two smart people do in this situation? Look it up on the internet!  If someone can describe how to install a pump in four paragraphs how hard could it really be? All we needed was a wet/dry vacuum, tools and some time.

And rubber gloves… and old towels… and no sense of smell… Kevin gamely bought a shop vac and began to remove the foul smelling stuff from the mysterious hole in the basement floor.  Several hours later, with no end to the ooze in sight and no good way of handling the waste we came to the conclusion that $1,200.00 was a very fair price.

Some anniversaries are silver. Some are gold. This one was just plain sh*@.