Day 3

July 26, 2010

I forgot to point out one of our other discoveries yesterday. On the east wall of the dining room, we found two windows that have been boarded up. Alok thinks we should un-earth them and put in some stained glass.


The wall on the right is the one with two windows that they covered up.

So today, I worked most of the day by myself (Alok's working and I don't start teaching until August). The goal of the day was to strip off as much wallpaper as possible. Oh, I should also mention that I forgot my camera, so these are crappy cell phone pictures.


My biggest accomplishment of the day. This is the largest amount of wallpaper that I got off in one pull.

Here is one of the areas I was working on at the start of the day:

Area by the front door before starting


Area after

Now, that may not seem like a big difference, but we got off all of the green grass paper in the area (if you look on the right side of the before pictures, you can see some green left). The stuff on the wall that is brown is the backing, which luckily comes off well with the steamer (although, maybe I shouldn't speak too soon). Missy stopped by after work and helped with the stripping process.


Area prior to starting in the front foyer


Area after

Again, the tan stuff is the backing of the wallpaper. That's tomorrow's project. Not to speak too soon, but at least the stripping of the foyer area should be done in the next few days.

My mom also stopped by at lunch and pulled off some of this wallpaper (gold grass paper) that was in the dining room. You can't really see a difference in the picture below because the backing is almost the same color as the wall, but you can see where it is peeling off.


Area in the dining room



GOOD BYE GREEN GRASSPAPER!

In addition to peeling wallpaper off like there was no tomorrow, I had a ton of people come by. We got new locks, I met with the roofers who should start tomorrow, had a haul away service come and remove some of the stuff the Kaufman's left, had Peters come to quote the gutters, and had the mold people come to try to keep it from spreading.

When the people came to remove the left over stuff, the guy saw Alex in the window and said he was "scared for dogs." I took this to mean that he was scared of dogs and locked Alex in the apartment area, or so I thought. After pointing out the mattress that they should move out of the attic, we went downstairs. They put the mattress in the back of the truck and came back in from outside with Alex! She had somehow escaped through 3 doors (which I'm sure latched so well) and went outside looking for us. Maybe he really was scared for dogs. I'll find out tomorrow when he comes back to cut apart the box springs that he wasn't able to get out of the attic.

I'm using this to also keep track of how fast the mold is growing. Isn't that exciting?


Nasty growing mold. Let's hope the spray works.

The good news is the roofer ordered our shingles and got his permit so they should start tomorrow. In the meantime, we need to start "Operation Japanese Maple" since we have two of them that he said he would "try" to protect but will likely be trampled due to the area they are in.


Jessie