And the new wood floors we finally had installed? After a lot of work and more time than we anticipated, the house we bought had gone from this:
to this:
Things were changing for the better but there was still the issue of the windows. They just don’t make paint sticks the way they used to and every now and then I’d hear a loud bang! when one of the windows slammed shut which would not only make me jump but would send the boxelder bugs scurrying for cover. So we had seven new windows installed. This past December. About one week before Christmas. Most people might think installing windows in Wyoming in the dead of winter would be a less than ideal situation. But I felt that was a better choice than the distinct possibility that one of the window installers would drop a window onto his partner when a boxelder bug crawled under his shirt, up his body, emerging at his neckline and headed straight for his ear. It was much more fun to bake and feed my installers Christmas cookies than clean up blood spattered shattered glass.
Which brings me to the point of this whole post – our latest
project.
Right after we bought this “move-in-ready” house Dean said, “We
should tear out the paneling. I hate it.” I said, “No. I can live with it. It’s not that bad. We can paint it.” In hindsight, I have been wondering why a guy who hated the paneling insisted we NOT paint this section.
Hey, maybe he knew if I had to look at it every time I walked down the stairs, eventually THIS would happen --------------
Flash forward to last week:
Me: We should take
off the paneling.
Dean: We should have
done it before we paid somebody to paint it and before we paid somebody to put in new
wood floors and before we moved in a bunch of furniture.
Me: I decided I don’t
like it after all. If we’re ever going
to do it, now’s the time.
Dean: The time was
before we paid to have somebody paint it and paid somebody to put in new wood
floors.
Me: I thought I could be happy with it painted but I decided I don’t
want to live with it that way after all.
We haven’t put in any new baseboards yet and now we have new windows we
need to frame too, so if we’re going to take it off, now’s the time. It’ll be easy. We’ll just do it a section at a time. Pull off the paneling, paint the wall, move
on. Pull off more paneling, paint the
wall, move on. Easy peasey.
Guess what we did this weekend?
First piece of paneling ― off! Uh, oh. Might not be paint ready.
Really? Duct Tape? Who does that? I'm not worried. Much.
And then we discovered this gem. Ah....true
love....................except every time I walk in the door and see it I
feel like my house has been tagged and I'm living in gang territory.
Brick ― uh oh. Removing the brick ― real brick it turns out, not the fake
brick I always assumed it was ― hasn’t gone quite as smoothly as I had
expected. Dean thought I would get all
stressed and tense and regret beginning this project when we discovered we were
going to have to completely remove the wall board to get the brick off. And I
probably would have if I hadn’t become a TV addict. But after spending time with Nicole and Drew and Jonathan (what else can I do in Casper when
most of my stuff is in Sheridan?) I knew there was nothing we couldn’t conquer with a little
elbow grease and the right tool ― if only we could find the right tool … 
“Just bang it with a hammer. That's what they do on TV,” I told Dean. And it worked. It was faster. What's a little missing wallboard?
Nothing about house remodeling scares me now ― which really scares Dean. Especially when I wondered outloud how hard
it would be to remove this part of the ceiling so we could really
open up the area and give us that open concept. Dean thinks
there’s support beam hidden in there. A
support beam wouldn’t be THAT low in the room …. would it? There’s only one way to find out.
Once we get the rest of the bricks ripped off the wall and
all the paneling is gone we’ll call a drywaller and
have him texture it or do whatever it will take to get it ready for painting. I may be much braver about these projects
thanks to my new TV friends but I’m not stupid. I know our limits. And anyway, I'd like this project to be finished relatively quickly. There's a guest bathroom I have my eye on.
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