The Orphanage

I went to see the movie The Orphanage tonight.  It's a suspense/horror movie from Spain, produced by Guillermo del Toro who did Pan's Labyrinth.  I don't think I've ever seen a horror movie in theaters before--this was more psychological horror than blood and guts horror--and I was on the edge of my seat and creeped out for the entire thing.  

The only reason this is loosely relevant is that the opening credits of the film are shots of children's hands pulling away wallpaper to reveal the names of the actors, directors, etc.  It obviously reminded me of the wallpaper-pulling I had done recently, but there was such an eerie effect to it that I think it will be a while before I do any more.

 

Like picking a scab

This is what happened when everyone else was working on a project and I had nothing to do: I accidentally pulled down all the wallpaper in the bathroom.  We had originally planned to paint over it because we were worried that if we tried to get it down, we'd just reveal more paneling, which might lead to gutting the bathroom, which is definitely not something we can afford to do.  Thus, we were willing to do a cover-up job.  However, we did want to try to get the border down to cut down on the number of seams that would show.

When I started to work on the border, I realized that it wasn't actually paneling behind the paper, it was a real live wall!  I felt compelled to honor this wall, one of the only ones in the house, by getting all the wallpaper off.  Then, I reasoned to myself, we could just paint the walls.  The paper had been applied shoddily, full of bubbles and peeling sections, so painting the wall seemed preferable.

However, the wall itself had been scored, meaning it looked like someone had taken a knife and tried to hack it to pieces.  In many places it's uneven and full of ridges.  In other words, a coat of paint is not going to look as great as I'd hoped.  We might put another kind of wallpaper up, or we might just paint and deal with a goofily-textured wall.  But personally, I enjoyed my frenzied hour of ripping.

Day 3: Layers

We've concluded that the previous owners either owned a paneling store or kept one in business--there are at least five varieties.  And that's not counting the layers of wallpaper: gold glitter spatters on top of green stripes on top ofwhite-based floral on top of gray-based floral--on top of plaster, in between layers of paneling.  

Today the walls start coming down.  Greg's cousin, a contractor, spent the morning looking things over and confirming that gutting the place and then hanging sheetrock is the best option.  It's a big expense that we hadn't planned on, but the difference it will make will be huge.  Below are the right and left walls.  The layers of paneling on the right wall were held up with glue, which makes for an interesting animal-print effect.   

The layers on the left wall were held up with ferring strips--not quite as picturesque, but it gives us something to hang the sheetrock on.

Day 3 is also the day that Andrea showed up to graciously spend her Christmas break helping us out.  As usual, she stole my camera and took pictures of herself.