passion flower and blue paint

This is one of my favorite plants in the garden. The flowers are different and unique looking, the dark green foliage is beautiful and as a quick grower, it should cover a good deal of this wall before summer. The vine is on the left in this picture.

Here is the flower - this vine sometimes produces fruit, but I'm a bit skeptical of eating produce grown around all this, um, wildlife.

I love how the tendrils are always reaching for something to grab.




We also painted the back door and awning blue... along with our bench, that was looking pretty sad lately. At first the blue was jarring, but it's really starting to grow on me. I would like to replace that awning at some point.



Sorry the pictures are blurred... I'll be switching to Flickr after this post.

And one more - this is the Salleyway I mentioned in a previous post. We're looking for a gate to replace this old, dark wooden door. This picture, makes it look bright in here... it's usually dark and the air is stale. We pressure washed this past weekend and plan on painting it all a light yellow color sometime soon.

wallpaper removal

There are many ways to remove wallpaper. I initially tried a mixture of fabric softner and water on wallpaper that had been scored - I've heard of this working, but it didn't fair too well. It would have taken months to finish the job we have - and I imagine it would take ten bottles of fabric softner. So we rented a steamer for $34.


...still a slow process, but it helped immensely. It's easy to use and no chemicals. First, you fill the tank with hot water - it took about 30 minutes before the steam started, so the hotter you start with the sooner you'll be working. It's a relatively small tank, but it lasted a good amount of time. While you're waiting for steam, score the paper so that the steam can permeate the glue. Slowly run the steamer plate over the paper and it should start loosening from the wall.

The stuff in the bedroom was horrible and took much longer. It came off in two layers, first the decorative easter egg layer, then the backing paper.

The walls will need repair and primer before painting, but it's nice to take a step in the right direction.

The ivy paper was thicker and held together, so removing it was much easier. You can also see that we ended up exposing the brick all the way up the stairs. The darker diagnol line is where the roof over the basement stairs used to be.

Some tips:
-Keep a spray bottle nearby. If the walls are very wet, it comes down easier;
-Using the scraper is sometimes inevitable, but I tried to keep it's use to a minimum. If everything is wet, you can use your fingers to pull it down with less damage to the wall;
-Pull slowly and try to get as big a piece as possible.

Circe's Kitchen

Just had to provide a link to the Circe's Kitchen blog post on The History of the Kitchen in art.

Thanks to writer and kitchenista Kirsten!

Peggy