Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Feeling Down? Scrape!

Things around here haven't been great, I try to remind myself that there are a lot of people who are worse off than us right now, but on days like today I just let myself wallow in self pity.  I lost my job a couple of months ago and I thought this would be an ideal time to get back into the swing of things working on the house.  This would be especially useful if we are forced to sell it due to unemployment, but since nobody is buying houses in Albany or anywhere else for that matter, that's not really an issue.  So, unemployment began and there was a week or two where I was decompressing and making calls and I wasn't ready to start house work then.  Then my sister got married and we had to travel so that ate up two weeks what with all of the packing and laundry and planning and then unpacking and laundry and recovering from too much cake and booze.  Then right on the heels of the wedding, we had to travel to MI for some godparent duties for my niece and nephew, so that's another two weeks especially considering that I caught a nasty chest cold the week before.  I made a miraculous recovery in time for the 4 hour Easter vigil and then we drove back home and the chest cold returned.  Then the cold turned into something much more nefarious... pneumonia, so I'm unemployed and had to pay a gajillion dollars in copays for emergency medical care and regular doctor visits and prescriptions.  THEN, as I started to feel like death was no longer imminent, came our 5th wedding anniversary and the party that we have been planning for months complete with out of town houseguests, AND I developed thrush.  The party was fun for everyone, but my mouth hurt and I was exhausted and I just wanted to go home.  Anyway, that's a really long and boring way of saying that now that I've been unemployed for nearly two full months, I'm ready to get my teeth into a project.  

SO... I waited until it is 90 degrees and the house is hotter than outside and I am working on scraping the wallpaper in the bedroom.  Last summer, I peeled away most of the top layers of paint and paper, there are posts about it, but now I'm actually getting down to plaster and committed to finishing it.  On the advice of a friend who has a beautiful Dutch colonial I'm using something called DIF.  On the front of the bottle it says, "The only one that actually works".  How's that for a slogan?  Maybe if I put something like that on my resume I would actually get some calls.  Anyway, you put it in a garden sprayer and then cover everything in the room with it including yourself and then wait 15 minutes and viola!  layers of paper peel away like magic.  That is... if magic feels a lot like regular old elbow grease.