It's the little things you do together...

Well, the school year is now in full swing and it hasn't made it any easier for us to make progress on the house.  I needed a major break from kitchen cabinet doors, so I decided to tackle some smaller, more manageable projects the last few weekends.

Remember how right after we closed on the house I just couldn't wait to start tearing at the wallpaper in the front entryway?

Yeah, well...then we started working on other things and it's looked like this for the last month and a half:

So, last weekend I decided it was time to take the wallpaper down for once and for all.  It's a small space and fortunately there was only ONE layer of wallpaper in here, so most of it went pretty quickly.  I worked on it by myself and the main walls took a bit over an hour.

I should mention that one of the best things about this home renovation is that Sean and I split the work up pretty well.  We both work on big projects together, but some things I've tackled by myself, and other things Sean has taken on solo.  He's pretty much in charge of all of the maintenance stuff...getting things serviced, cleaning gutters, trash pick-up, basic yard maintenance, etc.  I'm more into the home organization and design stuff.  It all balances out.  Anyway, Sean didn't skip out on the wallpaper in the entryway because he's lazy...he had spent the previous day setting up a rain barrel and redoing our gutters.  So he's working hard, too.  That stuff just doesn't make for very interesting blog posts!

Ta da!  SO MUCH BETTER without the wallpaper.  The tile is still ugly, but at least it's not ugly-clashing-with-more-ugly any more.

The last thing I had to scrape was the inside of the arches.  Those had multiple layers of wallpaper carried over from the living room and dining room, so they took a little more elbow grease...luckily it was a small area, though.

We found this pretty flower...we think this was the original 30s wallpaper.  

All it takes is vinegar & water...

...a good scraper and some elbow grease.

The dining room side came down easy.  The living room side was more of a problem.  I was worried about that side, because the living room has several layers of wallpaper underneath the paint.  We thought about scraping it down before we moved in, but it's such a large space and it would have taken us so much longer, we figured it wasn't worth it.  The wallpaper had already been painted over by the previous homeowners, so we figured that we weren't committing too big of a sin by just adding one more layer of paint.

The problem was that we somehow have to find a way to cut the edge at the archway.  I am still trying to figure out what the best thing will be to do this.  I was able to use an x-acto knife and get a fairly neat edge.

This is looking up at the arch...right side is the painted living room.

I'm thinking I might try some light spackle just to smooth down the edge, and then sand and prime and paint. Fingers crossed.

Of course, nothing is that easy.  In fact, maybe I shouldn't have said to Sean, "Wow, this wallpaper is coming down too easily!  It's not even a challenge!"  

I was tempting fate...and fate can't resist temptation.

 Ok, so ONE SIDE of the arch into the living room is not wallpaper.  It's some sort of plaster that was painted over.  You can see where I tried to lift it off (thinking it was paint over wallpaper) and it just chipped away.  My guess is that there was some sort of damage to the wall at one point and they patched it up, but I couldn't tell that until I started trying to scrape it off.

I was tired and stopped at that point, so it's still just sitting there like that.  I'm thinking now that the best thing to do would be to spackle the edges, get it as smooth and even as possible, and just paint over the whole thing.  Grrr.

That was last weekend.  Flash forward to this weekend, and this morning I was way too exhausted to attack the entryway again, so I opted to focus on a few quick and easy "feel good" things.  Sometimes you need those.  So, to offset the frustration of the last few posts, here are the AWESOME and EASY things we've done:

Our dishwasher has two drawers that can operate independently of each other (i.e. you can run one drawer but not the other), so it can get confusing as to which drawer is clean and which is dirty.  Enter two inexpensive ($3.85 each) magnets from Zazzle.com, and voila!  Problem solved. Here's a close-up:

They've worked great so far, and the yellow looks good with our new yellow walls.  

Then there was our cleaning supplies cabinet, which is one of the ones still needing a door.  So, every time we went into the kitchen, we were looking at this:

Yeah, we just kind of dumped all of our cleaning stuff in there when we moved in.

We bought a $30 storage rack and four small robe hooks (about $8 total) at Target, and about an hour later:

This actually makes me want to squeal and jump up and down.  Type A much, Lindsey?  Yes.  Yes, I am.

Maybe we won't put the door on that cabinet after all...