January 7, 2017
Happy Birthday, Susie. (Susie owns this house.)
First great thing: I turned on the coffee pot and it worked. Yay. Coffee first, then tackled the kitchen wallpaper. Those are bird houses in the border. The rest of the walls are supposed to look like crackled paint. Out. Dated.
Remove the wallpaper !
Here’s another view. Big wall.
This went really well. For some strange reason, I decided to grab my garment steamer from Waterford before I left. It’s a Conair device that’s made to eliminate wrinkles in hanging clothes — or draperies, I guess. Anyway, I started that up and off I went in the corner of the room. Steamer + scraper = paper falling off the wall. Yay. Later on I plugged in the Scunci steamer but that didn’t work as well. I put vinegar in the water, mostly to keep the hard water from clogging the machine. So the house smells a bit sour.
I can’t think of a better activity on a sub-zero day than steaming away on the wallpaper. It not only warmed me up, but distributed a bunch of good humidity into the house.
While I was waiting for the steamer to re-heat, I pulled off the transition strip from living room to kitchen to see if the hardwood continues into the kitchen. It does not. And there’s more tile under this tile. I suspect that if the top tile is not asbestos, the bottom tile might be. I’ll be checking to see if asbestos needs to be removed entirely to sell a house (?) or if it only needs to be covered up (which seems kind of dicey to me).
Good day! Coffee pot works and so does the steamer. Tomorrow: end of wallpaper.