a couple of days late, but it's here! the next post ...
we spent the past weekend working on the guest room - scraping walls, burning fabric off the walls and painting. our first task was to get all of this construction adhesive off of the walls. the picture below shows it on one part. imagine this all over every wall. super big pain in the ass.
and here's the fabric. also imagine that all over the walls underneath almost every nail. another big pain in the ass.
so we went to work. the liquid nails website (construction adhesive brand name) recommended that we either use mineral spirits to remove the adhesive or vaseline. since we had vaseline around, i decided to try it out on one wall. i put it on and left it for over a week (the website recommended several hours to several days). and then this past weekend we went to scraping. this worked really well and it's what we are planning on doing in the bedroom. i think it works so well because it's thick and stays in place on the adhesive. we also tried goo gone - which was in a spray bottle and supposedly for heavy duty (doodie!) projects like this, but that didn't nearly work as well. i think because it's so thin and drips down a lot. we got a couple of fancy scrapers as well as a scraper that we had around and went to town. this was one of those classic projects where the non-fancy stuff works best. turned out the vaseline and the old scraper kicked the most ass. the new one was too sharp and kept digging into the wood. here's a picture of sean workin'. he has that thing over his face because of all the adhesive particles in the air. for those of you that don't know, sean's kind of a hypochondriac. he was convinced we were getting cancer!
for the fabric i bought a torch and burned all that shit off. it was really tedious and time consuming. but not nearly as hard as getting the adhesive off.
our original plan was to put up a chair rail and wallpaper basically the bottom half of the walls, but we changed that plan once we started. we decided to wallpaper one whole wall instead - the wall where the bed would be resting against. this was mostly because (like in the living room), the stupid construction guys put up a beam in the middle (almost) of the room, and chopped up one of the wood walls and did a super crappy job putting it back together.
sean went about putting up this hardy board stuff on the wall - so we could more easily wallpaper it.
there's the beam at the top in this photo below. and you can see some of the crappy job that they did with the wood walls.
after two long days and some cancer later ... voila! below is the wall with the hardy board (soon to be wallpapered), and the wall that we primed so far. much more to come this weekend in this room! let the fun begin.
isn't it cute? - we love how rustic it looks. can't wait to see it finished!
in addition to our work in the guest room. sean and i went to the natural gardener. if you guys haven't been there and live in austin, it's a super awesome organic nursery. they also offer free classes on different things - which is why sean and i went last weekend. sean has this obsession with all things alcohol (more to come on that later in this post), and really wants to try growing vines outside so he can eventually make wine. the class this past saturday was a vine pruning class and a basic introduction to growing grapes with two guys that were really knowledgeable. it was awesome. after a little while i got bored and decided to walk around. i have been thinking about starting a vegetable garden here on douglas street and recently read that it's time to start tomato and pepper seeds inside. so ... i decided to go to town and get some. i also bought a lamp and decided to go all professional. step one on becoming an amazing tomato grower complete!
i planted black krim tomatoes, brandywine (red and yellow) tomatoes, golden california sweet peppers, yellow pear tomatoes and sweetie tomatoes (cherry).
wish me (and them!) luck!
and last but not least ... i bought sean a beer brewing kit for xmas and a couple of weeks ago he started his first batch. i bought him one of the easy kits for his first time as this was what the guy at austin homebrew suggested. sean let the batch ferment for about 11 days and then last night we went to bottling. here's all the bottles sterilizing.
and here's sean's first homebrewed beer! he did the Cooper's IPA. he mixed in some sugars to carbonate the beers and has to let it sit in the bottles for a couple of weeks now. should be ready when we get back from columbia!
hopefully we'll have a beer party soon if these suckers turn out!
happy wednesday! the perk of doing a post this late is that now the weekend is so much closer! cheers to us hopefully having a finished room to show off!
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