Wallpaper is the Devil...and other home improvement adventures.

So my entire house is in a state of ...... "flux," shall we say? "Flux" being a fancy word for "shit hole." Most of you read my blog religiously, I'm sure (insert sarcasm) and already know that our basement flooded in June, so we had to tear out the carpet down there, so the basement is a giant mess. We had purchased hardwood floors for the main floor before the flood, and the plan was to have them installed this week while Brian is at RAGBRAI (more on RAGBRAI adventures in a moment). My dad is installing the floors. Since I decided against going with Brian this week, I had planned on painting a few walls in the basement in anticipation of my very optimistic moving of my office from the "nursery" (a/k/a second bedroom) to the basement. This move is insanely brave on my part, considering my office used to be in the basement and I moved it to the second bedroom after about a year of trying to get pregnant citing, "Fuck the stupid baby, I'm working in an area with windows," or something to that effect, as my reason. Now since being diagnosed with PCOS and put on the correct medication, I decided it's a good time to move back down to the basement, because hopefully I'll be pregnant soon.

I also planned to rip all the super freaking ugly wallpaper that is not my taste out of the downstairs bathroom and paint that room as well. I figured since most of the baseboards are torn out and there's just concrete for a floor, it's a great time to paint because I don't have to be quite as meticulous as usual.

So in preparation for this week, we've spent the last two weeks tearing out the carpet and linoleum upstairs (and then pounding in about 3,000 staples and chipping away at the subfloor that had been installed with a wood chisel and a hammer), and the pulling all the baseboards from upstairs so my dad can get going on installing the floor. As I was pulling up the baseboards, I realized that they needed to be sealed with Kilz (a primer that we're sealing the rest of the floor with), because they smelled bad. Probably a result of the previous owners' dogs peeing on the carpet, then our cats deciding to cover that with their own special brand, which is half the reason we pulled the carpet to begin with. So I thought to myself, well, if I'm going to seal the baseboards, I might as well paint them white while I'm at it. BUT, if I'm going to do that, I'm going to need to paint ALL the trim white, and I needed to do that before the floors were installed so I didn't drip paint on them. So I spent last week painting trim. It's a project I don't recommend. It's tedious and horribly time-consuming, and just plain a pain in the ass. But it was worth it, because the trim looks great.

So the trim is painted, baseboards are not, but that's okay, I have some time. I drove Cam and Brian to Missouri Valley, Iowa, to start RAGBRAI on Saturday, and came home Sunday and put the first coat of paint on the basement walls. It's green. I'm not sure I like it very much yet, but we'll see.

I woke up this morning around 6:30 to the sounds of a giant thunderstorm. My electricity was out. I went back to sleep, waking up around 8:30. Power was still out, so I waited around for a while, read a book for a few hours, but still had no power, so I decided to go shopping. After shopping, I stopped home, still had no power, so I went to my grandparents' to go swimming. This was all terribly frustrating, because I could get nothing done around the house. I couldn't paint anything in the basement because I couldn't see very well without lights, and I couldn't seal the floor upstairs because I needed to vacuum it really well before doing that.

The power was on when I got home around 5:15, so I took a shower and ran to Home Depot to pick up a few things, including a steamer thing to remove the wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom. I started removing the wallpaper around 8, and at midnight I came wandering back upstairs, still not completely finished, but tired of standing in a steam-filled bathroom talking to myself -- on a side note, my pores look great.

I seriously can't wrap my mind around why the previous owners of my house loved wallpaper so vehemently. It was EVERYWHERE. The kitchen was covered in it. Some of it had birdhouses on it, and the rest was plaid. I think it took me three days to get all of that out of here. There was a border in our bedroom that had to be removed, and both bathrooms are filled with foofy, fancy, makes-you-want-to-puke wallpaper.

I'm fairly certain that wallpaper was invented and patented by the Devil, and was manufactured in Hell and shipped here via UPS -- who I also hate for separate reasons I won't go into right now -- for all of those who owned houses in the mid-90s to install, only to torture those of us who bought those same homes 10 years later, because all of us HATE IT, and now have to either remove it and paint, which is the correct way of doing things, or just paint over it. I hate doing things half-assed, but I'm starting to understand why some people paint over wallpaper. It's awful to remove. All the glue. All the layers. The people who owned our house enjoyed doing one pattern on top, one on bottom, and then a border at chair-rail level, so there's three separate types to remove, each more difficult than the last. I think I hate them. I'm tempted to drive out to their brand-new house in Eldridge and wrap the entire exterior in some garish wallpaper just so I can watch them steaming it and scraping away at it. I think that would amuse me.

On top of all this, there's nowhere in my house to sit comfortably but the bedroom. The office is filled with furniture from the living room, the basement is torn up, and the kitchen table has been removed from the kitchen. All of the furniture upstairs was moved so my dad didn't have to mess with it while installing the new floors. Problem is, I don't know if that'll happen this week. He said he'd probably get to it tomorrow, but then last night during that giant storm a huge gust of wind blew off doors and blew down walls in the storage building that he owns, so he had to spend all day fixing that today. Poor guy. When I talked to him to ask him a quick question, he just sounded so defeated. I feel so bad for him.

So even though I'm complaining about all of this, I'm kind of amused by all the roadblocks (thought not at the walls and doors of my dad's storage building being torn off, because that's not funny). Home improvements never go as planned, no matter how well you schedule things out. The only thing I can do is chuckle at all of this, and look forward to the near future when my house will no longer feel like a perpetual construction zone. My new floors are beautiful, and I'm so excited to have them in. I'm also super excited for the ceramic tile to be installed in the basement (we're not putting carpet back down there), but that probably won't happen until the end of August, which is fine.

Wow, that got awfully long. I'll have to do a separate post about RAGBRAI.