Wallpaper Report and More

Remember the 80's "country" style of decorating? When we moved in to this house, I had blue and yellow "country cows" wallpaper all over my dining room and kitchen soffits for about three years before I finally tackled that stripping job. I was pregnant with #4 and it took me about 4 days.

So you can imagine my surprise when my more recent wallpaper choice (circa 1998) came down in about three hours!

I know that wallpaper glue got more removable in the years between our first and second wallpapers. But the other big difference was that instead of just lil' ol' me, I had a team of two moms, 8 teens (if you'll allow the three 12-year-olds that monniker), and two 9-year-olds helping!

I still have to go over each wall myself to make sure we got all the glue up, and spackle in the dings and dents, but otherwise, we're ready to paint. Looks like we're going to do this room ourselves, since our friend is unavailable right now.

But I couldn't quite finish with that because after we finally got all the sticky, dried-on bits of wallpaper off the floor, the table, the corner bench and all the dining room chairs (this job took the kids almost as long), we had to switch gears to the next thing. Father Rooster is making a trip to WI tonight after work, to meet with the core team as he does on Wednesdays when possible, and so he is taking a 15-passenger van-load of boxes and small furniture up to our storage space. We figured we might as well move as much stuff as we can in this way, but let me tell you, with all 4 benches out of the van, the cargo area is ENORMOUS. I don't know if I can pack fast enough to fill that van once a week! (Maybe I'll pack faster once I'm certain that it's ALL going. Right now I'm selective, which takes longer.)

This morning, it's on to the next thing--itemizing all the things I'm donating to the charity that is coming tomorrow. Father Rooster did our taxes last night, and Turbo Tax has a built-in program called "It's Deductible" that automatically assigns a value to each item you donated to charity. I've always estimated very conservatively on what these goods were worth, but with a detailed list in hand and the values from this program, I'm sure we were able to deduct much more this way. And boy, do I have a lot to hand to this fortunate charity tomorrow! It's just going to take me awhile to write it all down prior to bagging it up and getting it all out to the garage.

Then, we have to play "Perfect House" again, because we have another showing this evening! This will be our third--someone came on Sunday too. We got a little feedback from one of the realtors that came through: they said the house was priced right and showed well, but their buyers didn't like its proximity to the horses on our neighbor's property. To us, his nearly 2 acres of land adjacent to ours is a plus, not a negative, and you can barely see the horses from our house. So I guess those weren't the buyers the Lord has in mind!

On the home-buying front, the bank pre-approved us yesterday for the seller's asking price, so we're good there. I was a little nervous about that myself, since we already have one mortgage, but it looks like they have no problem with lending us hundreds of thousands more.

Father Rooster and our friend Jan are going to go have another look at the house tonight, prior to writing an offer. Besides being a realtor, Jan has done a good bit of construction and rehabbing of homes, so he's got some thoughts on things we should write in to the offer to ask the builder to do.

So--after tonight's look-see, we'll probably be ready to make the offer on the house tomorrow!