Saturday we made good progress on the wallpaper removal. It's been such a slow process, the paper is so old and brittle, it just comes of in tiny little pieces and in several layers. And the ceiling wallpaper was put up with some kind of super thick glue that required extra scrapping to remove the glue, even after the wallpaper was down. Poor Mike did the whole ceiling by himself, but he did a great job!
Notice anything else different in the picture?? That's right, we changed out the light fixture! No more plastic fruit fixture for us. We got this fixture a few months ago on a sale table at Lowes. I don't really like it that much, but it takes 2 75-watt bulbs and it was cheap, simple, and has no plastic fruit, so it met the requirements. The kitchen is a lot brighter now, which is great. The fixture was a huge pain to put up though, having installed several light fixtures before we didn't think it would be a big deal. We still have knob and tube wiring in certain areas of the house, and lucky us, this was one of those areas. We did something wrong the first time we installed it and caused one of the wires to melt inside the fixture, woops. It's up and working now though, and at least we've figured it out because I'm sure that we'll want to install some other fixtures in areas where we still have knob and tube wiring...

I thought this was funny, when we were putting up the new light we noticed that the ceiling is a newer drywalled ceiling that has been installed about an inch below the original plaster ceiling. When we looked up into the hole, we noticed that the original ceiling had also been wallpapered! Can you see it in the picture? It looks like green flowers or something. Was this a trend that I didn't know about?? I guess the previous owners really liked to have wallpaper on their kitchen ceilings!

Here's the trash compactor that we removed. We put it out for the bulk pickup this week and someone else has already taken it. Not sure why someone would want a very old, very dirty trash compactor, but whatever. Maybe the same person who took our old shower doors? It's funny what people take when we put out our bulk pickup items. No one has wanted our blue, green, or pink carpet scraps though. Anyway, we had to take the countertop out here b/c it was really just sitting on top of the trash compactor. Someday we're planning on making a simple cabinet base to put back in this area so we can put the countertop back on. We need all of the counter space that we can get!
Look! No more wallpaper!!! The whole kitchen is wallpaper free! It was a big moment, we finished on Sunday night. I think Mike almost cried with happiness. Wallpaper removal is his least favorite thing. And the kitchen has taken over a month to get to this point. You'll also notice that I started removing cabinet doors to start sanding and priming, stay tuned for that project...

Happy Election Day, don't forget to vote!