It finally feels like progress.

To the right, we have Patrick, who's been painting the back room (formerly this) all morning. In the middle, we have a hallway wall-- trim painted, spackle sanded-- awaiting its first coat of paint. To the left, we have my craft room/office, drying. I am in love with the color, are you? Patrick is unsure. I say, how could you NOT love a color called Velvet Evening? Velvet. Ahhhh.

This weekend, it finally felt like we were starting to get somewhere. We painted two rooms. It feels SO GOOD to not be staring at white walls anymore! Patrick is a badass when it comes to freehand edging, which is just one of the many reasons I love him.

Saturday afternoon, we'd been painting ALL DAY. Everything was wet. A couple things were done. We still had time left before our journey back to Binghamton, and we needed a project. A non-paintbrush related project.

So clumped downstairs. Clump clump clump. We meandered around the downstairs, which we hadn't yet touched. All our work, up until Saturday afternoon, had been upstairs. The work upstairs was more pressing: get rid of Jungle Book exorcism colors, make it livable.

Downstairs, we had wallpaper to contend with. A million years ago, before I even had a blog (imagine!) Patrick and I had a wallpaper stripping adventure in Binghamton. We'd been dating less than a year. I had just moved in. I have to say, in retrospect, that embarking on a month-long home-improvement project is NOT the way to consummate a relationship. We survived, of course, and the room we stripped has been my favorite ever since. BUT. It was an enormous, onerous job. So you can understand our hesitation in stripping the paper in Gilbertsville.

We stood in the Purple Room. My back was to Patrick, and I was in the midst of saying something like, "Gee, I mean, it's purple, but this stuff really isn't that--" when I was interrupted by a giant Shrreeeeeeee-ipth! from across the room. I turned. Patrick had tugged errantly on a loose corner of the paper, and the entire sheet had come miraculously down.

No stripper chemicals required. No scrapers. No month-long chaos. I gleefully joined in the project, and we'd completely stripped all three rooms-- dining, kitchen, and Purple Room-- within forty-five minutes. We capped off the night by pulling the dining room rug, revealing some beautiful, warm, narrow-plank pine. The entire downstairs is ready to paint.

We definitely made headway this weekend.