minutia happens

When you're retired, long holiday weekends don't mean much anymore.  Mostly, they serve to remind us that visiting parks or tourist-attractions is a poor idea, till everyone goes back to work/school.  So these days, we tend to stay "in" on weekends and common times of schoollessness.  Over THIS weekend, I finally put the wallpaper up in the main-floor powder-room.

(The first time I referred to that room by that name, my husband was confused -- what's a POWDER room?  ;-)  "Half-bath" then....  I'm amused by anachronistic and euphemistic words of various times and places -- they say so much about a culture.)

The amount of paper I applied, less than two "double rolls" in a high-ceilinged room about one meter by two, with space taken up by a toilet (the sink and wall light fixture were removed), and in which my ladder's legs could only be spread completely when extending out the doorway ... took me two afternoons!  Mercifully, I didn't do the entire height -- there's to be wainscoting.  That tiny job was harder work than papering my husband's office, which is good-sized.  My leg-muscles are still recovering.

I raise my coffee-cup to whoever invented pre-pasted wallpaper.  My gods, how CLEAN it is to hang that stuff!  THIS paper was the first I have ever had to paste myself -- I had goo on my clothes, on my arms, IN MY HAIR, probably on the dog, too.  I had to use the dining-room table (covered with a drop-cloth) for the pasting surface because it was the largest and steadiest surface in the house ... besides the floor, of course ... and anyone who has lived in an old house with the original wood floors knows, that surface can be less-than-solid, too!  ;-)  I'm just happy I didn't get paste on the rug -- at least not in its damp state -- I daresay there are plenty of dry flakes shed from the dropcloth.

Have you ever looked at the ingredient list of wallpaper paste?  It reads like the ingredients of commercial food thickeners!  Cornstarch, cellulose, sodium nitrate (to help resist mold I assume).... I suppose if one were starving it could be eaten -- but what am I saying?  A lot of the ingredients in this stuff ARE eaten, daily, by people who think their diets are "healthy"!

But I lived through it, and the results were GOOD, despite the fact that room is not "square."  It is, in fact, one of the curiosities in this house -- I believe it was originally a china-closet, or maybe the place where the original owners locked up the silver.  We have a "door to nowhere" in the dining room which obviously led into this little space, and it's lined with sheetrock rather than the lath-and-plaster found everywhere else; its window is also obviously not original.  In the twentieth century, where more than one bathroom was expected to be in every house of a decent size, someone apparently chose to sacrifice the built-in closet for the sake of a WC on the ground floor (good choice...).

Today, we continue the good work, and fit in the bead-board wainscot that we painstakingly hand-grained to coordinate with the rest of the woodwork, and then we can reinstall the sink and light.  YEA!!!  It's nice to not have to use the kitchen sink to wash our hands after ... you know....