Shop vacs, cheap wallpaper and......

Well, we made it to the insulation prep phase, so a good cleaning was necessary. All those wood shavings, nails, screws, drywall scraps, etc., in between the studs in the wall had to go.  After vacuuming for 4 hours Sunday (and several sweeping Saturday) I have a renewed appreciation for janitors and garbage collectors.  I think it was Studds Terkel, in his book Working, that stated that you should think about the work someone is doing and the more you wouldn't want to be doing it yourself, the more your respect for that person and position should increase. I love that concept to this day.

I learned more than I wanted about shop vacs this weekend!  Basically, a cheap shop vac (day after Thanksgiving sale) is a cheap shop vac.  Good for dust collect in the shop perhaps, but...... Even though it is a bit smaller and the hose is easier to handle, it also gets block more often, making your vacuuming experience a slow and unpleasant one!  AND that wide end attachment they have may be great for sucking up water, but it is terrible for vacuuming up large areas of fine dirt !  Even the big shop vac isn't good for that.  I finally grabbed (at Bill's suggestion) our good old household Eureka Mighty Might portable and voila!  Those little wheels on the base of that attachment worked wonders!   I filled up the bag in no time and found we had no new ones!!!   Oh well, it was time to go home anyway.... the dust was getting to be too much (yes, we are wearing our masks!) and we knew Samson and Minnie wanted their walk.

Bill was hard at work placing blocking in the walls for all those towel racks (hmmmm, we could have used more free wall space!) and hand rails we might need in the future.  Oh yeah, my sisters say we'll be moving to a condo before we need those!  Well, someone will find them handy.  We also took pictures of the entire place sans dry wall so we can refer to them in the future and hopefully avoid any electrical wires or water pipes when, if ever, we want to do another home improvement project.

And my feelings on wall paper haven't changed!  In fact, if anything they have gotten worse!  The drywall person who came in to set up scafolding this weekend suggested that the cheaper the wallpaper the harder it is to remove.  Well, if that is true, the wallpaper in the dining nook was CHEAP!!!!  It may have been the remover I was using (far more expensive that the vinegar and water mix we used before, which was GREAT on the grass-cloth paper in the den, but it smelled a lot better). Whatever the reason, it wasn't fun.  If you are planning on doing this in the future I would try the vinegar and water solution on a small area first and it it works go with it.  Or our electrician (yes, our electrician) said Martha Stewart suggestion fabric softener and water.  That would certainly smell better, especially if it was Downy (my sister Ann had someone ask what the perfume she wore was and they discovered it was her Downy fabric softener). Leave those little bottles of the wallpaper remover at the hardware store if at all possible and use that garden sprayer I talked about early.  Much more economical.

This lovely wallpaper came off in two layers.  I thought the
first layer was bad!  Ha!!!!  The second layer was even more
feisty!  Argh!  

See those little score marks, they help the remover soak thorough
the paper so that it can work on the adhesive.  Yeah, well...........
It was great to see the last of the paper go.  Hopefully, the drywallers
can work their magic this week and this area will be ready for paint by
the end of the week!