Dawn Brocco's Life and Design Blog

Hubby discovered that there's 8 layers of paper on those walls, not 5 - which would explain why the painted paper layer, which I thought was ONE layer - has been SO hard to get off!

Many hours of work doesn't even get 1 wall stripped - he's gonna call around to rent a steamer. We're too old for this cr*p! If it works faster than the grunty, manual method, I'll strip the paper in the pantry as well.

That's the thing about an antique house whose plaster walls were meant for wallpaper (no hard finish plaster coat), is that people are lazy and just kept piling it on over the past 160+ years. Now I read it was OK to put 3 layers of paper on the walls, but nowhere does it say that 8 layers is acceptable! And this house has 13 rooms, 13 rooms with 8 layers of paper on them.

We've made alot of progress, however - after the bedroom we're working on and the pantry walls, there's only the front hall - up and down - that needs stripping - but we're not going there, as it would entail scaffolding and more weeks than we have.

We've got tons of other projects to do before relisting this spring - like putting in new carpet in my 2 office rooms and the family room, and putting in a dishwasher, bar sink and beverage cooler into the pantry, a handrail on the side of the garage, scrub then reshellac all the floors, get the front section of roof redone (not with our labor, thank goodness - roof's too steep), get a gazebo (possibly), and get a vent-free fireplace insert for the dining room fireplace, which SO doesn't meet modern day code.

But it's one of the issues that came up constantly - does the fireplace work? Oy. Believe me. we were just as disheartened, when we opened up the 2 fireplaces to find that one was bricked up to vent the boiler, and the other has no damper and was never meant for wood burning - only for hosting a wood (or coal)-burning stove. But 13 years ago, when we bought this place, there was no such thing as LP vent-free inserts. Ya wait long enough and something gets made to fit the bill. Hopefully, the insert size will fit the fireplace - we haven't measured yet.

Yes, I know - there's far more life stuff to write about around here, than career stuff. But the biz has periods of no news (as I can't write about certain things IF and until they come to fruition), whereas the house, The House (bow lowwww), is ever demanding of our labor. And the peri-M just keeps taking chunks of my life and throws them away, like yesterday. By the end of the day, hubby just gave up looking at me. Who can blame him, I'm a royal mess these days.

I did finally crack a lace stitch pattern in BW's 3rd Treasury. I've got this particularly-shaped shawl/shawlette in my mind and I wanted this one particular pattern, and no others!

The *multiple plus* was all wrong, though, made worse when I began to do side increasing. Took me a couple days fighting with it, and looking for another pattern to use!, but I adjusted the stitch count, which made it logical and easy to remember and work, yet it still kept the same visual pattern.

Designers don't just design garments, we also design and redesign stitch patterns, so that the resultant garment doesn't torture the knitter to make it, but is often unbeknownst to the knitter. Like scraping wallpaper, it's a labor of love.

Labels: lace pattern, wallpaper stripping