The hardwood floor in the kitchen/family room needs to be stripped and refinished. Since we have to remove all the furniture it makes sense to paint as well (besides the fact that it needs painting). The room has a cathedral ceiling which means two walls are 14 feet high in the middle. The previous owners put wallpaper on one of the high walls, so the job for the next few days is to remove the wallpaper. First thing I did was google "stripping wallpaper" --- found lots of information and u-tube videos. Apparently, there are 3 types of wallpaper: dry strippable, peelable and old fashioned wallpaper. There was a bit of wallpaper over the kitchen cupboards so I decided to test what I had learned on the Internet. After carefully grabbing a corner of the wallpaper and pulling as instructed I determined that I had peelable wallpaper --- not the best result but not a bad result. Next test was removing the paper backing, which was a bit of work but doable. Before I could continue with the rest of the wall I needed to clean the dining room, pack the contents of the display cabinet and find two strong men. Ed rounded up our neighbour Rob and the two then moved the display cabinet into the dining room(thus the need to clean it).

On Day 2 of wallpaper removal we carried in two ladders --- one a regular height step ladder and the other a tall step ladder. Then, Ed being the smart man he is, quickly left the house to take care of jobs in his workshop and outside. When I was stripping the wallpaper by the peak I came across the surprise --- we had noticed wrinkled wallpaper but when I removed the paper I found the big crack in the drywall. Luckily fixing cracks isn't under my job description, so I showed it to Ed and continued stripping. By the end of the day and after many trips up and down ladders I had peeled all the wallpaper off and removed most of the backing paper and glue.

Day 3 of wallpaper removal saw all of the backing paper and glue removed from the walls and the walls rinsed to remove TSP I had used to remove the glue.

Ed who can't leave a problem, started looking at the crack at 10pm. He woke me up to tell he had figured out the problem. The drywall hadn't cracked but had let go at a seam because a piece of wood had been pushing the drywall out. The kitchen/family room is an addition and the wall with the wallpaper had been the original outside wall, and the piece of wood was probably one of the original roof joists. Good news was he could fix it.