Progress

With the texture gone from the ceilings, I spent most of yesterday and today removing the wall paper in the downstairs half bath and the kitchen. When they built the house, they put the wall paper directly on the finished sheetrock. Despite my scoring and wetting the paper with paste solvents, I still managed to remove most of the paper that's attached to the drywall. So now, I pretty much have a kitchen and bathroom that looks like a cardboard box fort. I'll post some pictures when I get back into town later this week.

I started putting a skim coat of joint compound on ALL of the walls in the kitchen and bathroom. This takes a ton of time, probably more time than putting up new drywall. I'm not going to spend $300 on new sheetrock, so this is the method of choice. I WILL have flat walls, just going to take some time to do everything.

So far, in 12 days, here's the list of what's been done. I'll post pics when I can.

• Downstairs ceilings de-textured
• Replaced the locks
• Replaced the motion sensor light outside the garage
• Replaced the two lights outside the front door
• Put in a garage door opener
• I've mowed the lawn a few times
• Sprayed the weeds with the first coat of RoundUp
• Removed all the wallpaper in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom
• Filled 3 32gallon trash bags with dirt, ceiling texture, and trash from the house and garage

I've probably spent about 30 hours working on the house. I need to add up the receipts, but I think I'm up to about $1200 at home depot, including 30 gallons of paint and primer than I'm hoping to put to use sooner rather than later. I've also got 400 feet of 4 5/8" crown molding sitting in the garage just waiting to go onto my newly flattened ceilings and primed walls...

Off to Boston for a few days for work. I'll post some pics when I get back Wesnesday.