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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Attention Deficit Disorder and Stripping Wallpaper

Last Saturday morning I announced to my husband: "I want all the wallpaper gone in our house, with all the rooms painted, before my purse party on the 26th." He turned to me, then gave me a look like I asked him to give the dog an enema. Needless to say, that was the extent of his enthusiasm throughout the weekend.
I am the first to admit - I am not a big fan of wallpaper. We've owned a few different homes, and each one of them required a lot of wallpaper removal and re-painting. I'm a big planner... I like to take a critical appraisal of the room, decide the wallpaper has to go, then head off to Benjamin Moore for paint samples. While I do some of the stripping and painting, the majority is left to my husband. I do a lot of circling the color squares and asking, "Do you like Cocoa Brown or Cobblestone better?"
The house we're in now had a Wallpaper LOVER as the previous owner. Complete with bird's nest-borders in the kitchen, and some kind of tapestry fabric in the living room. The wallpaper is coming off okay, but the glue backing is going to drive me to go stark raving mad.
The three repetitive steps are the worst:
Score (the wallpaper with the circle thing)
Spray (with Dif or something similar)
Scrape (with the metal spatula)
Score. Spray. Scrape.
Score. Spray. Scrape.
Ugh.
I can do it for all of 3 minutes before something else grabs my attention. "Hey Mom, can you sign this permission slip?" "Phone's for you..." "Do you want a piece of toast?" (Hell to the yeah, of course I do...)
Stripping wallpaper with adult ADD is no easy task. I'm not trying to make light of ADD; a couple of my kids are treated for it. And just to be clear... I am not one of those mothers who believe "behavior modification" is the key. No way. If I could slap an Adderall patch on my kids' necks each morning on their way into school to make them behave, I would. I'd sprinkle Ritalin on their cereal if it made them remember to pick their towels off the floor.
A few years ago I was in the doctor's office with a few of the kids, trying to do a "patient assessment" on one of them, to determine if they did indeed qualify for ADD or ADHD. The doctor asked me if ADD ran in the family. I must not have been paying attention because he cleared his throat and asked again. "I'm sorry, what?" I asked. I had been busy doing the scratch-n-sniff off a magazine perfume sample. When he repeated his question, I nodded knowingly and leaned forward. "They probably get it from their uncle. He totally had it as a kid."
Needless to say, this wallpaper scraping thing is completely boring.
Score. Spray. Scrape.
Well, I better quit blogging and get back to scraping. I could have sworn I just saw a squirrel run by the window.

1 comment:

  1. love it!! hey we have a wall paper steamer...if you want to borrow it :)

    ReplyDelete