Girls at work

If I sit down early for the evening news I watch Home and Garden TV while I knit my sock and wait for the local news.  Young couples looking for homes and trendy apartments often remark disdainfully, “It’s so eighties!”  I smile.  That’s our house, it probably will stay that way.

Except Emily’s new room.  She picked the downstairs bedroom that she shared with Bekka when they lived here eleven years ago.  When Shelly and the children moved back to Lake County, it was a guest room for a while, but then storage snuck in.  Even the bed disappeared.  When the clear out started this week I idly slid a fingernail in a seam of the grass cloth that went up in 1988.  In total sheep as a lamb mode, I lifted a little more and stripped the entire sheet from floor to ceiling

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Two girls spent much of the week scraping the grass cloth’s lining sheet off the walls.  That was the brutal task.  I woke up one morning at six, to the smell of eggs and scraping.  “Oh, Tom burned his eggs and is scraping the pan,” I told myself before going back to sleep.  Two hours later I really woke up; there were eggs for the early risers and Laura had been scraping walls since breakfast.  Laura has a vested interest in this room, too.  She and Emily currently share an upstairs bedroom.  When this room is done, they each will have a room.  As I heard her tell her friend, “We each will have our own closet!”

The old paper was scraped off the walls.

The paste was washed off.

Patched and sanded.

Finally.  This room will glow.  Yellow ceiling and two walls.  Two walls pumpkin.  Uncle Tom painted the ceiling and two walls; grandma painted two walls and Emily is doing all the cutting and trim.  Looking good.  I bet we’ll be shopping for new blinds tonight and moving her in tomorrow.