This week began with snow. It snowed Monday and into the night. We woke to about an inch on Tuesday morning. Most of it thawed by lunchtime and I was able to get out in the afternoon and cut down two more birches to keep the wood furnace supplied.
The latest truck is performing well (see last post) and, after an oil/filter change, is running as sweet as a candy bar. It pulled a fifty foot birch tree out of the forest with no effort at all.
Today, I’ve been tiling at either end of the work-surface that separates the old dining room from the kitchen. The work on the old dining room should have been finished by now, as all that’s left is the wallpapering, but choosing the paper proved a nightmare. We couldn’t find anything we liked that would go with the new wainscot, and eventually settled for one from Menards (for non-US readers, that’s a vast national D-I-Y chain).
Once home with it we still weren’t sure. Then I realized I hadn’t allowed for the pattern-drop when measuring up, and we needed at least one more roll.
Back to Menards the next week, only to find all their wallpaper stock had been cleared out ready for a ‘new line’ coming in. Yes, they could probably match the paper but it might take weeks to get another roll.
So, tomorrow, we take it all back to Menards for a refund, and start the great wallpaper hunt all over again. Meanwhile, the lining paper will have to suffice. Even that’s a vast improvement on what was there:
Somewhat transformed to:
And here’s the original room prior to the wood stove installation. The old barn wood on the walls had never even been planed, and shed vicious splinters at the slightest touch:
And how it looks today:
It will be so nice to finish this room and move in the piano and other furniture. But how soon it happens will depend on our success choosing a new wall covering tomorrow.
I’m not holding my breath.
The next big job is the bedroom. Nine feet by twelve is hardly a master bedroom and a wall has to come down to suitably enlarge it before we can consider redecoration.
A local builder was recommended to us by a neighbor, and I telephoned him two weeks ago. He agreed to come round last week and estimate the job.
We’re still waiting.
There’s a decidedly manana attitude in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and just as in Mexico, it rarely means ‘tomorrow’…just, ‘not today’.
