Scraps

It’s been a bits and pieces kind of weekend. As in, there are bits and pieces of wallpaper all over my house right now…

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There might be some in my hair…

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Definitely more than one scrap made it into a recent load of laundry. (Try not to fall out of your chair because I actually did laundry.)

But do you know where it’s not?

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On the walls.

Let’s revisit 1989 again for a second, shall we?

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What strikes me most about these pictures isn’t just my inherent ability to take a relatively clean space and turn it into an absolute disaster inside of 24 hours…

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It’s that I feel really good about it.

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Even though it means I’m walking around with trails of wallpaper attached to my foot like toilet paper from one of those awkward public restroom moments, and there’s drywall dust everywhere, and I have to contort my body into advanced yoga poses every time I want to walk by the makeshift scaffolding on the stairs, this is still my happy place.

Every time I have to balance on the makeshift scaffolding on the stairs, I am still in my happy place but I’m also 1.) really grateful for eight years of uncoordinated gymnastics classes in my formative years, and 2.) hoping my mom has recently prayed for my heathen soul.

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So far so good.

There will be a not insignificant amount of drywall dust in my future (and my hair) as I finish up the patches where the skylights used to be…

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So, once the drywall patching is done and I scrape all the dust off, I’ll be finishing up my latest DIY fashion show by sporting a coat of SW’s Roycroft Mist Gray on pretty much every unclothed inch of my body for the next week.

What can I say? It’s a glamorous life.

20 Responses

    1. Clearly some html-ish brackets don’t show in your comments, so without my (runs and hides) after that I look like a total asshole, which I’m not- just a big fan of natural light.

    2. Haha. That’s funny Chris. I’ll admit to rolling my eyes all the way back into my head when I read your comment, but I didn’t think you were an asshole. A lot of people give me shit for getting rid of them, but I just assume these are people who have never dealt with a leaky skylight before.

      Also, I don’t really love the way they look in the ceiling… it feels a little dated. But maybe I was being influenced by all that wallpaper!

  1. The difference is amazing! Love the color you picked out.

    With our ’26 bungalow I became a pro at stripping wallpaper. Minimum 6 layers in every single room. I hear ya with it everywhere.

  2. Thanks- sometimes making a comment on a blog like this can go completely sideways in a hurry.

    Leaky skylights must go, and I’ll admit those weren’t exactly attractive (or symmetrical). Not sure what the outside area looks like, but you could consider a dormer-style down the road. At least you could get rid of the roof angle (again, not a favorite) by going that route.

  3. At some point in the past the skylight over my stairs must have leaked, before I moved in. It is okay now, cross fingers, and it gives an amazing amount of free light on the stairs.

  4. I loved the natural light, but I am 100% with you on fixing the problem before they leak, because, let’s face it, eventually they would have!

  5. That hallway already looks so much more peaceful – even in the first pictures with scraps everywhere! It will look great painted that color.

  6. I’m working on a DIY house as well. Whenever I do something like floors, painting, new something or other, etc., I say to myself, “Erasing someone else’s memories and installing my own.” Making it your own is the best part of any project.

  7. I’m with you on the skylight issue, not worth the future hassle. The first time my nephew saw a skylight in my sisters new house he was about 5 and asked “How do you turn it off?”. Love your blog by the way, both helpful and entertaining!

  8. 500% improvement! And now you can see that cool light fixture in the stairwell – the wallpaper really swallowed it up before.

    I have an extremely dark stairwell in our new house – I’ve decided to strategically hang mirrors on the landing and in the upstairs hall to bounce around some light, rather than poke a big messy hole in the roof (and my eye, because that’s really what it amounts to, in labor, cost & future problems!)

  9. HUGE difference! It looks a million times better now! Much better than “paisley married Ikat and then threw up all over the walls.” I am not missing that skylight. If lack of natural light really bugs you, then maybe you can remove the walls to one of the bedrooms and have it be an open tv area or something. A friend did that when she had her house built – she used a bedroom as a tv area for her kids and it completely lit up the stairwell area thanks to the window in the room. And it looked really nice too thanks to her Pottery Barn charge card. ;-)You can always reframe it into a bedroom if you want to sell it in the future.

  10. Love it!! Buh-bye 80’s! And yeah – friends had a skylight in their cathedral ceiling in the bedroom that leaked. No thank you.

    And on a different note, who’s used those tube thingy’s instead of skylights to bring in some natural light and did they work with no leakage? I think you can put those in even if you don’t have direct roof access right above where you install them since they can be angled and whatnot. Just curious since I have some dark spots in my house and thought about using them.

    1. my grandmother has had the solar tubes installed in her last 3 homes and has absolutely loved them. She’s never mentioned any problems. And boy do they bring in light!

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