We made a lot of progress on our dining room wall restoration Sunday afternoon. Lots of people dislike scraping wallpaper, but curiously enough, Maria and I both love getting wallpaper off and brightening up rooms. We are getting pretty good at. We both score the wallpaper, I pour on a steady warm water laced with fabric softener (I use a garden spray hose and plastic bucket.) Maria does most of the scraping, the thing is she loves it, it is the perfect work for obsessives.

We went to the hardware store and picked out an orange yellow paint (with primer mixed in). We did little or no sanding, we like the slightly rough, almost stucco look for the living room. This will mark a huge transformation for our home, an 1840’s farmhouse with seven rooms on the ground floor – parlor (my study), living room, which we scraped and painted two years ago, dining room, kitchen, small pantry and bathroom.

The dining room was the darkest room in the house, and the dingiest, our new color, which we put on one wall today, is a dramatic change. Maria came up with the impulse Saturday, and she is true chore obsessive. I have to stop her, which I will do shortly, she’s been at it all afternoon, and would keep going until midnight and beyond. I love the work we have done on our home, this is the kind of thing I always hired other people to do, and this is the strange thing about challenges and so-called troubles, it’s really all about how  you react to them, change and challenge are as much a part of life as breathing. We won’t get this room finished for a few weeks at least, although Maria is a dervish when she gets fired up, it could be sooner.