Of Houses, Wallpaper and Sugar

Good Lord. When did I start this post?????
Perhaps I should abandon words and make this a photoblog? Lately, I have had little time to formulate words either written or, sometimes, even spoken! One night recently whilst playing games with The Bestie and The Opera Singer, I found myself unable to formulate coherent sentences or follow the play. And I was not drinking at the time! I am trying to cut myself some slack. It has been a stressful and overwhelming 6 months.

I got the keys to my new abode on January 15th. We (The Bestie and I) immediately decided that the carpets were a lot worse than they had first appeared. Re-carpeting was too expensive so I decided to sand and polish the floors before moving in.
Unfortunately, this meant that moving in and starting back at school, happened in the same week.

 Here's the lounge room during the sanding process.

This is the 'family room' (west view). That strange construction at the rear on the left is the entry to the cellar. The doors in the wall are blessed, blessed storage.....<3 br="">

Now, here is an example of how over enthusiastic girls can create issues. The Bestie and I tore out a bookshelf to find this behind it. What next, we wondered?


Here's the floors after their treatment.

The lounge room  looking North and....

Looking south.....

At this point it is worth noting that the removalists had come on their original appointed date, regardless of floorworks, so we had had to pile all the furniture into the bedrooms which were not getting the floor 'treatment'.

 This was my bedroom.

Once the floors were 'walkable', we moved all the boxes and furniture into the rooms that we thought would become their permanent homes. This is the family room looking west.

Aaaaand, looking east....

Suffice to say a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing of boxes and  other large items occurred before everything started to settle in. By the way, that wooden construction above the family room is a mezzanine floor! Perfect for my sewing :-)

This is looking down towards the dining room. 

The kitchen presented problems as we didn't have the room for my oversized American style fridge. 

Here's the original:

The Bestie and I pulled out a bench and, bingo. Wall space. In this pic we hadn't quite moved the fridge into place as we were replacing the cork floor tiles that we had  damaged in the rip up.

Of course ripping out a bench meant I didn't have any bench space to speak of, so....

one 'gumtree' purchase later......

I'm loving this dinky kitchen now. The only thing it needs is a bench somewhere around where the wooden divider (near the camera) is. Well, actually that's not the only thing. The ancient electric range is a travesty and should be scrapped forthwith. The problem is its a domino effect, if I change this I have to change that and then I might as well change this too!....etc etc

But my post title included the words .....wallpaper.....

Now I will not lie to you. I have removed many a sheet of wallpaper in my time, usually with the assistance of the steamer, that wonderful modern contraption....however, this would have to rate as one of the WORST wallpaper removal jobs that I've ever had to deal with.....

Now on the back (highest) wall of the lounge room, there rested this innocuous beauty. I could have left it there but I knew that my time to strip things back was now. Besides, the paper was old and crusty, stained by many years of who knew what....

 We got stuck in, one Friday night, thinking it might take us 24 hours and, admittedly, the first layer came off without too much trouble. Then we hit ....this.

For those unfamiliar with the wallpaper genre, this is a foil based 70s metallic gem. It probably cost an arm and a leg when it was installed. It was a complete cow to remove.

The steamer had little effect on it. After two days of steaming and scraping we resorted to grinding the stuff off with a grinder. The house was coated in artificial snow!!!!!! Eventually, with two to three of us working at all times it took FOUR DAYS to completely finish the wallpaper removal!

Here's how things looked two days in...

Sadly, with our excessive steamer use, the underlying gyprock wall was completely trashed. The plasterer set us back another day....

So here's the finished product...

But now, this post is becoming unwieldy.... so I'll just show you my bush garden...

Which was ALMOST the reason why I didn't buy the property. Lord knows what I'm going to do with that wasteland. Stay tuned. And please share ideas :-)