Last summer we tore out the stained carpet in Ellen’s room and painted the old wood floors that lay beneath which had already been painted years earlier.  It was a decent project and we learned a lot about floor paint.

I don’t pay much attention to my stat counter for this blog, but I do like to see how people find Coal Creek Farm and the number one search that leads people to this place is Painting A Wood Floor, the second is Butt Cushions.

We’ve learned through our years of home renovation that some little projects lead to much bigger projects.  Painting the floor was one of those projects.

You see, I’m not very good at leaving things alone and there was this spot on Ellen’s wall where the paneling was no longer sticking to the wall and I wanted to see what was underneath that paneling.  Well, my little peek turned into me ripping a huge chunk of the paneling off the wall.  So, Ellen lived with that big orange blob in her room all year.

The day after she had the giant hunk cut out of her hand we decided to start ripping down the rest of the paneling and then we stopped, because that’s how we do projects in this family.  We start.  We stop.  We start.  We stop.  And then I lose my mind by proclaiming that every project must be finished by a certain date and I beg Clay to finish them.  Depending on how despondent I am, he will either ignore all of my begging and pleading or he will come to my rescue and finish the project.  One thing is certain though, I am the starter and he is the finisher.  It takes both of us to do a project or nothing will ever get done around this place.

And then my camera, which had been suffering from a terminal illness, finally breathed its last breath and I decided I couldn’t blog or write or clean the house or cook or really do anything without a camera, because how much fun is life if I can’t document it on the Internet?

And then Clay bought me a new camera, but that didn’t make me want to work on the room anymore than before when I was documenting everything with my piece of crap camera.

So, this is how the room looked for about a month.  I call it The Crack House, because…well…it looks like a crack house.

Beneath the lovely 1970′s painted paneling was the original lathe and plaster walls.  Most of the plaster was still in good shape but some of it crumbled to the ground in giant heaps.  It was a mess.

And guess what?  It still is a mess.

But, we’re working on it!  My new goal is to have it done before our first grandchild graduates from college and if I’m anywhere close to being correct, that should be in about 30 years.  Geesh, we better get busy if we’re going to make that deadline.