It's nice to finally be doing something on the house again. Since all the rain put everything on hold during the winter. We'll have to plan better next time or maybe just pray we don't have another major catastrophe at the beginning of the season that saps all our dinero!

Anyway, we've gotten all of the paneling down and that stupid carpeting on the walls. There was that same pressboard/fibreboard/drywall-ish kind of stuff up there that was in the living room but painted NEON LIME GREEN!!!! Holy jesus that's some eye-bleeding color in there! Other than the color, they seriously did this room on the cheap. The paneling was put over the drywall, except for 4 inches between where the wall goes from vertical to a slant because of the design of the house. The molding all around the room was plastic except for around the door which was just painted 1x4's. Plus, apparently they ran out of the pressboard/fibreboard/drywall-ish kind of stuff and for 6" around the entire doorway, they put acoustic ceiling tiles instead?!? It makes me wonder if the doorway was originally bigger all the way around. I really don't know. At this point, we don't have time to investigate or experiment because we're on a tight deadline.

So, we went and got sheet rock, mud, tools, tape, etc. We'll be putting up filler strips in the areas that apparently it wasn't necessary to have walls behind the paneling. We had to get some solvent specifically to remove the adhesive from the 2 slanty walls from the carpeting that was up there. Plus we have to patch 8,748,237,408,423,497 dings and holes in the walls and actually put up corner beading which was apparently also optional when whomever it was redid this room. It's going to be fun since Mike's never done this before and it's been years since I have. Let's put it this way, there was no such thing as self-adhesive seam tape when I was doing it last. I'm really looking forward to using that stuff. Plus, I made sure to pick up some seriously large trowels so that we don't have to do much sanding on the final coat.

Mike did get all the boxes of books out of the room on Friday and they are all in the living room right now along with the futon, all the rest of the stuff we had down here and the drywall. We no longer have a living room. That's ok, because we no longer have a hallway upstairs either because of the armoire, shop vac, ladder, heater and couch parts up there. Good thing we only need to cut strips off the drywall and bring it up there instead of whole sheets. It's difficult enough getting stuff up these damn narrow twisty stairs let alone the obstacle course of stuff.

We (meaning me) were apparently gluttons for punishment yesterday because we decided that the flower bed next to the driveway completely sucked and we hated all the plants in there except for the one calla lily. So everything had to go. I spent the rest of the daylight hours digging everything out of there including this massive ugly bush that didn't want to leave the ground, a holly bush that stabbed the crap out of me as I was digging it out, a smelly tree that stank like poo and about 20 gajillion square feet of live and dead ivy. Today, I'm going to get the rest of the mulch out of there, even it all out and hit it with a garden weasel thingy to aerate it. Plus I also de-weeded the other 2 plant beds this woman had out there. I'm going to get rid of the farking dandelions in this yard one bucket at a time. The anal retentive in me is delighted. Almost our entire 70 gallon yard trash can is full of nothing but dandelions and I haven't even hit the worst places in the yard yet. Ugh. Also because of all of this digging and such, it looks like we're going to need to do another bonfire next weekend because we now have this huge pile of stuff.

All this week though it's going to be working on that room each night until we have it all sanded and ready to prime. Katie has no idea what color she wants the room so we don't know if we need to use tinted primer or not. One thing we will be able to get done is caulking and painting the floor so it's ready for carpet or whatever she wants in there. Even once she gets here, it's not going to be fully ready because of all the painting and carpeting and molding that will need to be done.

Oh and to add insult to injury, while we were working outside, the little black kitty Ash decided the curtain on the center window in the living room bump out would look much better on the floor...rod, hangers and all. Yes, I know it's him, he's the only one with claws. Little asshat.
Well, I was looking forward to losing weight this summer, this is definitely a good start.