The featured pic here is the wallpaper we discovered a year or two after we purchased our house. Hidden behind a cupboard we were taking out, it was a nice little surprise from the 70’s. For campy atrociousness and vintage gay porn, it fits the bill (much like my current facial hair – hey sexy pornstache!) Yet for a home that you’re trying to drag into the new (now old) millennium, it had to go. Much like the last of the paneling that lined the stairway to the cellar. For years we kept it as it was – a faux-wood-grain, dark and dungeon-like, but too onerous to even contemplate painting. (Certain stairways run deceptively high – at its highest point this must have been at least thirty feet. Until you’re on a shaky ladder at that height, you don’t really realize how frightening that can be. I foolishly looked down and almost passed out.) The other peril of painting while wearing a sleeveless Patriots shirt can be seen below: paint gets everywhere, even under the watchful control of the most meticulous Virgo. But in the end, the results were worth the war wounds, and the final vestiges of 70’s influence have at last, eleven years into owning our home, been eradicated.
