Stripping down

A wise man once told me the best way to get to know someone is to strip everything off. Or at least he seemed wise when he said it...

We've spent the last days getting to know our new place by doing exactly that. Stripping everything off. It turns out though, contrary to conventional logic, the higher we went the harder it got to take things off.

One way of getting to know your house. Now, if you'd asked us what hell looked like on Saturday morning...

The ground floor was a breeze. For the first room all it took was a paper tiger, DIF solution, pressure sprayer and one day to go from this

9am on Wednesday

To this.

4pm on Wednesday

By mid afternoon on day 2 (Thursday), the other two rooms on the ground floor were done. 3 rooms, 2 days, piece of cake. Time to move upstairs with the image of having this tied up by Friday and a weekend in the great outdoors (aka the garden).

Pull the other one.

How many layers do you count?

The house was at one point in the past 2 flats. The ground floor was one flat. The first and second floors were another flat. Turns out the inhabitant(s) of the ground floor were neat and decisive decorators. 1 layer of wallpaper plus lining. However, the inhabitants of the other flat changed their wallpaper as often as their underwear, without actually changing it, if you get my flow. 6, 7, 8 layers with paint in between and walls lined with 40s newspapers used to cover defective plaster. Add to that the dogs of the last owner, who insisted on marking these floors as  their territory in non-liquid form (yes, that means what you're thinking) - making it impossible to stay in those rooms for more than minutes and requiring litres of vinegar to disinfect - and you weekend ends up looking like this.

Newspaper. Seriously.

Missed a spot...

In case you ever wondered what 5 rooms of compressed and stripped wallpaper looked like in. With another 3 still to come...

But here we are on Monday and we have a more or less naked house. We're wiser for it, albeit worried about the crumbling plaster down around fireplaces and windows.

And thankfully, reinforcements have now arrived.... (big hint on the right of the picture below)

Is that some serious hardware we're seeing?