What goes up must come down

I realize that we have been painfully bad stewards of the South City Lion Forum, but we will try to get better. I've been successfully putting my clothes in the hamper for the last couple of months, so maybe this is the next project towards self-improvement. What has become completely apparent about working on the house, is that it is a labor of love, and quite frankly sometimes hate. I would not, by any stretch of the imagination, suggest undergoing an admittedly minor rehab while one of the partnership is going to grad school - just don't. You think you have time, but you don't, or if you do have time, you want nothing more than to lay on the bed and watch endless hours of How It's Made on Netflix, not remove wall paper, paint or do other activities.

That being said, I am now on summer break, so I can spend time doing those things. (How It's Made still tries to call my name though.) This weekend Greg was out of town and I continued the seemingly unending task of removing wallpaper. Currently we are working on the living and dining room because I would like to have a living room on my 30th birthday, which incidentally is the third anniversary of moving into the house.

Initially the plan was to remove the wallpaper on the walls and leave the fairly innocuous wallpaper on the ceiling and simply paint over it. Well, sadly the wallpaper has other ideas. The ceiling wallpaper (ceilingpaper?) has decide on its own to come off in pieces as a result of the residual steam from the removal process. However, I am proud to say that the walls of the dining room with the exception of a very small piece above the buffet are without wallpaper. (As mentioned, Greg was out of town and there was absolutely no way that I was going to be able to move that by myself.) Now we get to begin the process of patching the walls and finally paint!

My 30th birthday is in less than 3 months, and I've been quite reflective as of late. I was thinking about this reflection as I removed wallpaper, uncovering layers of colorful paint in addition to the wallpaper. I was thinking about how much has happened in our house over its lifetime, and how each of the families that have lived in it have left their mark-- mid century style facade and fireplace, wood paneling in the basement, tiles in the entryway. Now we are making our marks on the house. Some of those marks are made by undoing, and some can be easily changed or removed, but at the same time we are continuing the life of the house. And I remember why we fell in love with this house. As things get closer to how they will be, I am filled with increasing excitement and I can't wait to see the results.