Decorating - slow progress

Still not much happening on the craft front, although it's only in part due to my ongoing exhaustion and lack of mojo. Instead, we seem to have spent most of our 'free' time working on decorating the spare room. Or rather, initially it was getting the room in a state where we could think about decorating it which is very difficult to do when it's full of miscellaneous stuff.

The first chore was to sort the stuff into stuff to keep and stuff to go out, then the latter into stuff for the bin and stuff to pass on. This took a long time. Not that we were delaying, but when you only really have weekends free to work on the clearing progress is slow.

Over the past week we've passed on redundant furniture via Freegle, with other bits and pieces to follow over the next week or two. On Saturday I took four boxes of some 250 books and another box of sci/fi magazines (some bagged and in mint condition) to the local Oxfam bookshop. Dave pre-warned the manager - who's eyes apparently lit up - and we gift aided the lot, so hopefully Oxfam will make a tidy sum out of them.

Books that I decided to keep either went into the attic or temporarily into the shed, pending movement to a more permanent location. This left us with a nearly empty spare room and so now the decorating has started in earnest.

Dave has discovered how easy it is to remove paint from woodwork using a heat gun and over the past two weekends, we've both attacked the multiple layers of wallpaper with gusto.

Dave in an action shot, up a ladder...



Ladders are out for me, so I concentrated on getting the wallpaper I could easily reach while Dave followed behind working either the more difficult spots or those that were high up.

On the wall pictured, the blue stuff is wall that I stripped back to a single layer of very well attached lining paper which has been painted. We both agree that we like the blue but that it's very dark for such a small room and would shrink the space considerably. On the wall above it you can see the original yucky brown wall paper which is rather like corduroy fabric to look at or touch. Under that was some floral stuff with dubious stains which we decided not to speculate on the origin of too much. The brown stuff came off easily. The floral stuff, not very easily at all. On two walls there's also a pale blue/grey layer which was also very difficult to get off, but we persevered with lots of water and elbow grease finally shifting it.

The blue layer we're left with is very well laid and on top of the plaster on most of the walls, so we've decided that it will probably do as our base layer for papering ontop of. Of course it will need tidying up, holes will need filling and several layers of PVA solution applied, but hopefully it will give us a sound base for our own layer of lining paper which we then intend to paint.

So progress is being made... Just very, very slow progress.