Wallpaper Time Travel

You may have noticed the blank stare from my blog these last two weeks.  This either meant that I had been captured by the Chinese government and was being held in stocks somewhere in a dark prison cell, OR I made it home from China and my life isn't nearly as interesting anymore.

Psst!  I made it home.

There have been some interesting things going on, but I was either too jet-lagged or too lazy to sit down and write about them.  I'm going with jet-lag.  It can last for two weeks, right? Right?

Well, one thing I've been up to (as of yesterday) is I've jumped back into working on my house.  I decided to finish peeling off the wallpaper in my bathroom.  There has been a two-foot-by-two-foot scrap hanging on for dear life behind the toilet, and another scrap over the door for the last several months.  The project was placed in limbo when we decided to give a big push through to getting the kitchen cabinets finished.  My poor bathroom has been living in a ragged twilight of existence ever since.  The light fixture over the sink dangles from the wall, being held on only by its wires.  Beneath it, I ripped a rusty medicine cabinet out, leaving a gaping hole in the drywall.  A spare mirror found in the barn leans against this hole, covering it like a badly placed bandaid.

It was time.  I was tired of hunching down to see if I had gotten all the mascara off my face at night.

So, I finished the wallpaper removal yesterday.  Have I mentioned how much I hate wallpaper?  I don't like to say the word "hate", but I reserve it for the few things in life that deserve to go back to the underworld from whence they came.  Like wallpaper....and mosquitoes.  Hate.

Peeling the wallpaper has been like a trip through time, though.  In a few hard to reach areas, like behind the toilet, there were several layers of it.

This was the outer layer.  It was probably done in the nineties when ivy stuff hit it big.  Lovely.

I don't have a scrap left to show you of the eighties layer because there was very little of it.  It was sort of like this, though:

Yup.  Definitely eighties.


And finally, the seventies.  Oh boy.  I love this one.  It perfectly matched the avocado green floor tiles in its day.

(Seriously people?)

After getting everything scraped off, I re-textured the walls with drywall mud.  I'm currently waffling between something pale blue-ish and something pale green-ish to paint on the walls.  I should be able to decide while staring at thousands of paint chips in the bustling aisles of Home Depot.  Right?

Well, if I pick a bad color, you'll know why.

(It's the jet-lag!)