Saturday, March 7, 2009

Squadra di pulizia

That's "clean up crew" in Italian. It's lunch break and I'm watching Lidia's Italy on PBS. We love her voice & accent - it makes me wish I learned Italian instead of all those other romance languages. And the food - yummers.

Anyways, we've been the squdra di pulizia all day (and yesterday too, and Thursday). On Thursday I pulled a gazillion little staples out of the ceiling strapping in the study. And de-nailed everything (there were lots, due to the paneling). We got a couple new prybars at our local contractor supply store - the Super Wonderbar and the 2 stainless steel ones, which are SHARP and great for slicing and pulling trim.

And started yanking down the green-painted wallpaper - just the easy pieces. Yesterday we didn't do too much, except a bit more of an attack on the wallpaper. Here's one fragment of a fairly cool old border, possibly the oldest and maybe original layer:

Also, thanks to Craigslist, we got rid of the paneling we pulled down. We had 6 people reply to our posting for free paneling, and one woman came by and picked it up right away, which was great. Reduce, reuse.

This morning, Ken woke up ready to go and finished getting all the stuck-on wallpaper off. I did my Cinderella bit and scrubbed the walls to get the glue and little bits of extra paper off. And we pulled all the rest of the nails. He also laid out the positions of all the electrical. I kept scrubbing. Then he put in all the plaster washers where the walls were coming loose. I kept scrubbing. We chatted about strategies for some patches, then I finished scrubbing!, cleaned up, and walked Eddy. Lunch break, then I'm going to go make a patch for the biggest missing plaster piece, then finish taking off wallpaper from the last awful spot (a tiny piece of drywall instead of plaster down the side of the door. Stubborn!!).

Squadra di pulizia - finito! Now, time for squadra di put-back-togetheria.

2 comments:

Tommy said...

Looks great!! Keep up the good work. You have inspired us to start a blog on our 1920 craftsman bungalow in Sanford, Maine.
sanfordbungalow.blogspot.com

us said...

I am so here