Progress…upgrading the hot water service (a little earlier than expected).

A month or so ago I woke up to find a pool of water on my dining room table and the floor nearby. I looked up to see this…

Yep, pretty sure those brown stains aren’t supposed to be on the ceiling.

Panicked, I ran out to the garage and grabbed the ladder so I could make a closer inspection of the ceiling. As I climbed the ladder, a few drops of water went by. Deifinitely not supposed to happen! I poked the brown stain on the cornice with my finger and it was basically a mushy mess. In fact I could push my finger right through it. Oh crap.

After an emergency phone call to dad (who knows everything) I called a plumber. He asked me if I’d been up into the roof and had a look. Ummm, no. Not going to happen. There’s spiders up there, hundreds of them. 30 minutes later he was up in my roof himself, and returned with bad news. The (very) old electric hot water service was cracked and the drip tray was rusted through. Get it fixed ASAP was his advice. Fastforward a couple of weeks later and I have this monstrosity attached to the wall of my house.
Definitely not pretty. But I’ll forgive it’s ugliness (and the fact it set me back close to $2000) because it is amazing. My hot water pressure is so much better now. And it runs on natural gas so I should start to see savings in my electricity bills. Also, I was planning to install one of these later (much later!) this year anyway. And it will no doubt add value to the house. Unfortunately, I now have to add ‘fix water damage on kitchen ceiling’ to my never ending to-do list. Sigh.

Progress…removing the old wallpaper (epic fail).

I have admitted defeat. After spending more than 2 hours stripping old wallpaper from one wall in the spare room, I finally came to the conclusion that the plaster underneath is beyond repair. So the wallpaper stripping has stopped and instead I’ll be looking into getting a professional in to replace the plaster, or more preferably DIY it myself. I’ve never done anything like that before. Can’t be too hard, surely?! Might need to get the boyfriend in to give me a hand.

In the meantime I’m moving onto some smaller projects – stripping layers of paint off the spare room sash window and prepping another door for painting. Just need to keep telling myself that every little bit I do is a step towards my goal of a dream (or at the very least, much improved) house!

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Progress…removing old wallpaper.

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I have developed a hatred for wallpaper overnight. My spare room is (badly) wallpapered almost 3/4 of the way up all around. It was always going to go, and last night I finally started the job of removing it.

I soon discovered that there was in fact 2 layers of wallpaper – oh joy. The top layer came off fairly easily, the bottom layer was tougher to remove. I searched the web and used the method of spraying the paper with warm water and dishwashing liquid, leaving it to soak in for about 15 minutes, then using a paint scraper to scrape the paper off.  A time consuming and fairly messy job! The plaster underneath isn’t perfect but is salvageable on most walls.  Some walls however are beyond repair! I think this is one of those jobs that I’ll just do a bit of each night after work until it’s finally finished.

The spare room – a work in progress!