Goodness...

I haven't been on here for a while, and with good reason...

Chrissy got married (and I was in the wedding)

I started teaching at UC (and the preparation takes a lot out of me)

Work has been hectic! Good hectic though.

Jerry and I have been working a lot around the house.

Speaking of which, look at what's becoming of the dining room...

Here is what the dining room looked like for the previoius owner:

When we moved in, we immediately pulled up the carpet and changed the light fixture:

Now we (I?) have decided that we cannot seem to decorate around the previous owner's theme. So we are taking down the wallpaper, and going with a two-tone paint scheme in addition to having the floors redone. So I have spent a decent amount of time over the past few weekends stripping wallpaper and trying to prepare the walls for paint...

We removed the chair rail and I took my first swipe at the wallpaper.

Then, I discovered that the paper had to be taken off in 2 layers - the top, colorful layer and the bottom paper/glue layer. My dad thought that this might have been bathroom-grade wallpaper designed to withstand moisture accumulation. Which makes sense since it repelled every product I tried to soak it with to loosen it.

Check out the awesome paint job beneath the paper! As of this picture, I have one entire wall finished, and 1/4 to 1/3 of each of the other walls uncovered as well. It should probably only take another half day (fingers crossed) to finish removing the bottom layer of paper and to scrub the walls. We will probably have the floors redone before moving forward with painting.

Speaking of the floors... We are planning to have pretty much all the floors redone on the main level. So while I was removing wallpaper, Jerry was tearing up carpet in the hallway. Aside from the nasty (hopefully removable via sander) stain that the previous owner left, I think it looks pretty sharp already:

We are hoping to work on removing the living room carpet throughout the week and have someone out to the house to estimate redoing the floors by this weekend. Hopefully, we can schedule the work so that it doesn't do a whole lot of interfering with my work schedule (since we can't walk on the floors for about 3 days once they are finished). Anyone wanna take us in during that time?