My head is spinning

(c) 2010 Ms. Huis Herself at musenmutter.blogspot.com

Our guest room looks like it belongs in a tenement house.

Not the beautiful furniture (Thanks, Mom & Dad for the moving-in present again!) but the walls. They are bare plaster, with a couple of patches of impossible paint. That is, other than the parts on the exterior wall that suffered enough water damage that they're down to the lathe. As in plaster-and-lathe-without-the-plaster.

Yeah, we got wall showing through our walls.

It looks like crap & it's bugged me for quite a while.

We'd made good progress last summer, when the high humidity aided us in peeling off the latex paint over the original calcimine paint. Heck, you could grab a corner and peel off a piece the size of a hand towel last summer, which is what we did. Got it all peeled off and washed and ready to go.

Except for the couple of cracks... and the now-empty electrical box in need of filling/covering... and the very-much-falling-apart plaster in the exterior wall... and maybe choose a paint color for someday.

Not that that's stopped us from having guests. Mostly the grandparents, but a few other hardy souls. (And a special greeting to all of you, too!) I always felt a bit embarrassed with the state of the room, but since they were good friends or relatives, well, it was fine.

But it still bugged me.

As always, Mr. Kluges and I have been talking about which house repairs/improvements to do when, what HAS to be done, what we'd LIKE to do, what's suddenly moved up on the priority list since it's started rotting through enough that's it's sagging down & looking to actually detach (Hello, foyer roof/eaves/fascia!). So I offered to call the plaster guys who did our ceiling back when the waste pipe leaked through the kitchen ceiling just to get a quote. (Even though I hate calling on the phone, I really do.)

I kept forgetting to call - or more accurately, remembering to call after 5pm or while I was in the shower or at swimming lessons or otherwise unable to actually do so. But this morning I called at about 8:10! Go, me!

And the guy said he could come out to do a quote at 1pm today, if that worked. It did.

So he came, took a look at the guest room & the dining room ceiling, gave us a quote and said he'd had a weather delay (new construction roof not done before rain = everything inside wet = not plaster-ready!) and that he could fit us in this week, if we wanted.

I called Mr. Kluges, we talked, he talked to plasterer, we received reassurance that he would definitely be done in plenty of time that it would not interfere with the guests (BIL & SIL & 2 nieces) who are scheduled to arrive on Friday...


... and then I spent much of the afternoon - and Mr. Kluges and I have just finished up - emptying out* the guest room and the dining room (Mr. Kluges really wanted that ceiling fixed) in preparation for the plasterers to come tomorrow morning!


Man. Home improvements don't usually progress at such a incredible pace around here!


*By "emptying out" I mean DR table deleafed & now in kitchen, side table in office, book shelf in LR, curtains thrown over LR chair, guest room bed disassembled & in playroom, nightstands & lamps in attic, all pictures down... those rooms are nothing but walls, windows & floor right now!