Remodeling in Technicolor! With Smell -O- Vision!

I managed to paint the boy's bedroom yesterday. It looks like Gymboree threw up all over the walls! The three oldest boys just could not agree on what color to have their room painted, so we ended up doing three colors. Let me clarify that this is not a style that I normally am attracted to. I find it overwhelming but, its not my room! Its a child's room, and since they change their minds fairly frequently, I'm sure I won't have to look at it for 20 more years. Five would be plenty!

Mr. Ireland started the beginning of his vacation yesterday. He is pretty terrific, choosing to spending his vacation working on the house. Of course, we have to be in it by the end of the month, so it's not much of a choice! With just over a week to go, we are down to the last of the manageable projects. Some things have made their way from the "before we move in" list to the "sometime after we are in it" list. We're trying to focus on paint and flooring and leave all the finishing work for later.

Triple layered living room wall, in all its pink glory

Yesterday we prepped the living room for painting, removing the wall paper border, filling holes, that sort of thing. One of the walls had two extra layers of sheetrock over the orginal wall... We were unsure of what we would find if we removed it, and were hesitant to do so, until I pulled the top layers back and peered behind it with a flashlight. I couldn't see any holes in the original wall or any reason why there should be another layer over it, and it looked like it was being held in place by a few nails, so we gave it a tug and down it came! Under the extra layers was a near perfect wall with pretty rose wallpaper. It smelled faintly of perfume and old house (it was not, however, scratch and sniff). We think the living room was originally 3 bedrooms, making a total of 6 small bedrooms on the third floor, so this had to have been a girls room! There was even a poster taped to the wall.

Smelling the wallpaper (we all did it!); Boys removing wallpaper.

Instead of removing the wallpaper, the previous owners chose to glue 2 layers of sheetrock together and nail it up over the existing wall. Talk about lazy! I'm sure it took far more time to put those up than the half hour it took for me and 2 children to remove the wallpaper! I guess we all use what we have on hand though. How about it, aunts? Recognize the wallpaper? Did you have any friends in highschool that had wallpaper like that?

Newly finished wall

After all that, we taped and mudded the wall and today I started painting the living room! I am happy to say that the ceiling is no longer magenta. I will not miss that color. With any luck, I will have the living room finished tomorrow morning and be able to move on to the dining room, the next to last room on my list. It is also the last room that needs to have walls textured. I can't wait to scrape the last smear of mud from the bucket and retire my blade.

Official count down to move in.... 9 days.