Day 1

July 24, 2010 was our first day of projects. Here I am with Alok prior to getting started on the house:



Our dog, Alex(andria) came over for the first time and enjoyed sniffing around. I can't imagine what that house smells like to a dog:

Alex running around for the first time

Well, for the first day of work, we (myself, Alok, and my mom) started peeling wallpaper in the front entryway. We decided to tackle the wallpaper first and then rip out carpeting when we were done peeling the wallpaper. I have never peeled wallpaper before, so it took me awhile to get the hang of it (who am I kidding... I still have no technique). We are using a steamer and scrapers to get off the wallpaper.

Here is the first area we started with:



This is really the first thing you see when you enter the house and is the area under the stairs. You can't see it very well, but that wallpaper has flowers on it. You can kind of see them there:


Lovely flowered wallpaper


Alok showing me how to use a steamer.

Pretty soon, I was the one working on the wallpaper, my mom was pulling out all of the curtains/cloth items that were hanging in the house to get rid of more allergens, and Alok was ripping up carpet upstairs. Oh, and Alex was lounging on the dirty window seat


Alex on the seat


Me scrapping wallpaper and my mom with some curtains she took down



This is the upstairs yellow bathroom that Alok decided to tackle first. When I asked him why, he said because it was the smallest room. It is literally the size of a small closet. This is prior to ripping up the carpet.

You can see the size better here:


The big question is to keep this as a bathroom (there are 4.5 others) or turn it back into a closet. Or possibly get rid of the bathtub, and just have a half bath. Opinions?


There went the bathroom carpet. Notice the lovely water (or other fluid) stains.


The bathroom post-carpet.


No more flowered wallpaper in this area.


After removing all of the wallpaper from the little area in the foyer, I moved on to the paper by the stairs:




I didn't get very far.

That was the end of our exciting day one. We were then off to celebrate our friend Kelley's birthday at a BBQ.

Jessie