inside and out, work around the house

A long weekend, and our only plan was to see how much we could work on around the house.  The poor girls - it's a good thing we have 3 dogs right now for them to play with, and that their friends down the street and next door were also in town, because they were sorely neglected (she said tongue-in-cheek).  We hardly saw them at all, except for them checking in for hugs and food.  (mostly food.)  They'd help us rake, or shovel, or water, or plant for a little while, then run off again!

Saturday was supposed to rain, so we planned inside work, but woke that morning to gorgeous sun... so to the garden we went!

First, we removed a section of garden on the south-east side, and I replanted the removed hostas and some purple iris on the north side (the iris in a sunny spot), while Jeff pulled out all those and some perennial geranium.  After all the re-planting, we re-sloped the dirt away from the house, Jeff using a 10' board, level, and tape measure to figure the slope.

Above you see the finished sloped dirt!  Yay - dirt!  We'll be filling this area with more native perennial plugs - 6-packs of little plants that will fill in thickly just like the rest of the south side plants.

Next for these areas is creating a wide grass path through the raspberry/day lily/blue flag mess, planting a blueberry patch (the pots in the above pic), and making a fence and gate to the path to the front yard.  We do love our fences around here.

Sunday after church, while our lovely bro and sis-in-law and family watched the girls, Jeff and I took care of a friend's hobby-farm-at-a-duplex, then took care of the 3 dogs, before heading over for a nice chat before evening church.

Back to work Monday!  Waking to a downpour and thunder, we decided to make the day an indoor work day (though the weather cleared by noon, it was a muddy mess out).  Last week Jeff (and Gret, to a much lesser extent ;) started removing the painted-over wallpaper in the stairwell:

For the amount of time she spent scraping, she had a lot of fun uncovering the old wallpaper from under the paint.  Jeff got this far with dry-scraping:

then yesterday before lunch we removed the rest of the painted-over wallpaper:

We're going through all this trouble because the steamer won't remove the wallpaper through the paint... so first the paint and the layers it's stuck to come down, then we steam and scrape, then wash with water and baking powder, lastly come back and wash with TSP and rinse (Jeff does that, I won't touch TSP).

It doesn't seem like much, and it didn't feel like us for all the work it was, but by the end of the day yesterday we got this far:

All the paint down, and the start of white bare plaster - our goal.  To get to this point is seeming to take forever, but we're thinking and hoping the rest of the stairwell steaming and cleaning should only take another full day of work.  ...so we know what we're doing the next rainy Saturday!  (all the while shaking our proverbial - and sometimes literal - fists at those who stick 5 layers of wallpaper to ceilings of stairwells then paint over it...)

Slowly slowly things around this almost 100-yr-old house are coming together!