house rules nos. 7-8

In Which We Learn That Bluebeard Knew What He Was Talking About

The saga of the ghastly wallpaper continues.

Monday, Mirrorthaw and I went down for a couple hours, him to spackle the ceiling, me to start sanding down all our spackle so we can paint this weekend (T minus eight and counting). So I sanded the small front bedroom, the upstairs hall and the upper half of the stairs.

Then I went into the large front bedroom and started with the wall from which we removed the ghastly wallpaper. Continued that this morning when h.l. and I drove down. And discovered that the reason that wall, of all the walls in the house, was the only one that had been wallpapered, and the reason that it was looking so excessively peculiar behind the wallpaper was that (A.) only part of it is an original wall (we are becoming increasingly mystified as to what the original layout of the upstairs was), and (B.) the part of it that is original wall had been mended with plaster-of-paris, which was starting to unravel off the wall.

And if we'd just been able to live with the wallpaper, we would never have needed to know.

At least not for a while.