Day 2

The second day was when we really, truly started taking the house apart.  It looked horrendous.  It's already a little tiny bit better.  Anyway, the wallpaper removal continued.  Poor Tony gets all the hard jobs, so here he is climbing the walls (and fridge) to get the wallpaper off the top of the kitchen walls.  The main level has ceilings that go from 8 to 12 feet, and he's at the 12 foot end.

The wallpaper behind the fridge was a great surprise; very charming.  Not every surprise is that much fun.  We'd planned to take down the medicine cabinet in the hall (yellow) bathroom - I don't think we have a picture of it before, but trust us when we tell you it had to go.  Here's what we saw when we got it down:

Apparently sometime in the last 48 years there had been an inset medicine cabinet here.  Yes, for all of you engineers out there, that brown wood inside the hole is framing for the roof of the main level.  While Tony did what he was doing in the last picture, I stood here, and we knocked back and forth on opposite sides of the same wall.  This is what we do for fun now.

Then we decided to put some test colors up on the wall, before painting the entire walls in the colors we'd picked out.  Here's yellow on the living room wall (note the tools that have moved in.  There are even more now.):

Not bad, right?  We tried what we thought was a complementary green in the office.  See what you think.

The color was called neon celery.  We wondered why they called it that.  Now that we've seen it - what else could you possibly call a color this awful??  So we tried out a totally new color that we both liked, even though it seemed a little much.  We didn't even test it, just started painting.  Mom thought we were crazy.  Here's why:

We're going to have a "lizard green" office!

We tested the grey we're planning on for our room.  I liked it so much I put the entire test pint on the walls.

That's our bathroom door.  There's one more big grey spot you can't see.  I like it!

By now, our crack wallpaper removal team had moved on to the guest room, leaving the kitchen looking like this:

Good-bye, wallpaper!  Here's how it went in the guest room:

What's that, you ask?  Why, blue.  Shocking aqua, actually.  Apparently, the last time this room had paint, it was this color.  Pretty soon it looked like this:

That was enough excitement for us, so we all went home for dinner.