Wallpaper and an Overplayed Analogy

Ren­o­vat­ing a house is a bit like tak­ing the clothes off of a woman; there always seems to be one more lay­er. Today I was walk­ing to the kitchen for some break­fast when noticed a cor­ner curl of wall­pa­per stick­ing away from the wall. “Pull me”, it said. I pulled. The whole sheet of wall­pa­per came off like a bra on Mar­di Gras. Before I knew it, two hours had gone by and I’d torn the wall­pa­per from two com­plete rooms. Why do I feel spent and light­head­ed and a bit gid­dy? Oh yeah. I nev­er made it to the kitchen for break­fast.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the plas­ter in the bed­room is so old that chunks of it came off with the wall­pa­per. I’m pret­ty sure Home Depot sells a repair kit. The bed­room still has its under­wear on. I need to sand the paint off the floor and strip it from the wood­work. That reminds me. On my way to the gro­cery today I think I’ll stop by the Cleve­land Green Build­ing Coali­tion to get a refresh­er on the ser­vices they offer for res­i­den­tial homes. Hope­ful­ly they do a lit­tle pro bono con­sult­ing, since I don’t know much more about green­ing a home than to use non-VOC paint and look for the Ener­gyS­tar on appli­ances.

In a won­der­ful world there would even be a lit­tle cash avail­able through grants or some such to folks who are intent on pimp­ing out their home green-style. I could prob­a­bly get a Restora­tion Soci­ety loan fair­ly eas­i­ly, but I’d have to leave the orig­i­nal win­dows, which per­fect­ly defeats the pur­pose of cre­at­ing an ener­gy effi­cient home if I have to keep 107 year old sin­gle-pane rat­tle-wood win­dows. I like the old style win­dows, but they’re drafti­er my wal­let these days.

I still haven’t had break­fast.