remodeling rehearsal

I may or may not have mentioned that we are doing some remodeling work for some people we know, which is one of the many reasons absolutely nothing is going on with our own house. Anyway, these people-- we'll call them Mr. and Mrs. V-- are the parents of one of Don's fraternity brothers-- we'll call him Little V, just because it will annoy him if he hears about it-- and they are very nice. They are hoping to sell their townhome, and it needs some work done before it's marketable. Enter us. Lest you think we are all charitable and stuff, be assured that we're being paid-- just not as much as Bob the Real Contractor might charge.

Anyway. So Sunday we went over there and took the wallpaper in the bathroom down. It was (I think) either latex or vinyl wallpaper-- whatever the kind is that isn't the papery kind, that's what it was. I don't care if you have no idea what I'm talking about, the point is that we didn't have to use one of those wheely-things to score it and stuff, and it wasn't too hard to take off. It came peeling off the wall in great big swathes, leaving behind adhesive, which we wet with a sponge and then peeled off in equally large swathes. Don said it was fun. I said it was like peeling sunburnt skin, but, you know, off of a very large person. Bathroom-wall sized, in fact.

We finished taking the wallpaper down, except for the bit behind the toilet (we'll get that next weekend when we pull the toilet away from the wall), and then Don took a crowbar to the baseboards. They came off without any untoward incidents, and we left the bathroom as clean as when we'd come in-- just barer. On the weekend after next, we're going to tear out the tub liner and tile the tub. That should make for an exciting weekend.

It's kind of like practicing for doing our house, but getting paid.