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I wish that on this Monday-after-the-4th-of-July-Weekend I could have some wild and debaucherous stories to tell you, but alas, my life is incredibly dull and boring.

I spent the 4th of July cleaning the house. Yes, you read that right. I CLEANED the house. Whoo hoo! I am one wild and ka-ray-zee gal!

But the fun didn’t end there. Saturday, the 5th of July was the *real* treat for me. I spent the day in our homemade sauna.

Homemade sauna sound fun? Next time, please join me… if you dare.

The bathroom in my parents house has been in desperate need of some TLC. It has had the same ugly peach/blue/striped/floral wallpaper for the (almost) 20 years since my family moved in.

My dad decided that he wanted to re-paint the bathroom. His plan was to paint over the wallpaper.

“WHAT?!?! You can’t paint over the already-bubbling wallpaper!” I screamed at him (in Mandarin). “You need to remove the wallpaper first before you paint it.”

Dad: “No. It’s too much work to take the wallpaper off. I’ll just paint over it.”

Me: “You might as well leave the wallpaper up if you’re going to do that!”

Dad: “Fine, then you steam off the wallpaper.”

Me: “FINE! I will!” [What?!?!?! Who's the dummy that said that!??!!?]

So I woke up bright and early Saturday morning to steam the wallpaper off the bathroom wall. My poor Brother got roped into helping & for the first couple of hours, it went quite well. He held the steamer and I scraped & pulled the layer of the wallpaper off. We effectively created a nice little sauna in the bathroom, as it was already a 95-degree day outside. With no breeze and virtually no ventilation, Bro and I were sweating away inside our cheery little homemade sauna. Nothing like a little additional heat & humidity to brighten up your 5th of July.

As we were kept working on the wall, we both kept commenting on the bizarre texture of the wall beneath this layer. I had never seen striped textured drywall. And I could still see the “artwork” some child had left on the wall with pencil and crayon which had been painted over with white paint over the texture.

Then we got to a big crack in the striped textured layer. And I peeked beneath it. And THAT’S when I saw the layer of grey I was expecting. So I peeled that away, & realized that beneath the grey was some wood-colored paperlike stuff, and beneath THAT was the plaster part of the wall we REALLY wanted.

And here are my IMs to Sharky when I realized I was wrong when I previously told her I was almost done taking off the wallpaper & would be ready to prime the wall soon…

me: hi. so i have to tell you i was wrong when i said the wallpaper was almost all off
sharky the kid: ok
me: it was 30-year-OLD vinyl, textured wallpaper on top of the dry wall. which had been painted and above that was another thing layer of wallpaper
sharky: ewwwww
me: so after steaming the first wallpaper off (which took a while, but wasn’t that hard)
sharky: ewwwwww
me: that wood colored paper stuff? that was the bottom layer of the old vinyl wallpaper. so we had to scrape the paint and texture off the vinyl in order for us to be able to steam the last layer of wallpaper off
sharky: oy
me: we gave up after more than 5 hours of messing with it. and i have to take another weekend and go back and finished what i started.
sharky: geez, so you didnt even get to painting
me: nope, we did most of the scraping
me: and there is still another small wall that still has all layers in tact
sharky: geez that sucks!
me: it was more horrific than i ever imagined. the original wallpaper paste is like 30 years old
sharky: yikes

At the end, my Mom joined in and helped scrape too, but there is still a lot left to do, before we can even prime the walls. Thanks to Sharky for all the wall, prep, & paint advice. Too bad I couldn’t actually USE any of the painting advice yet.

And I forgot to mention that in the middle of all this, we blew out some fuses to the house when we were simultaneously using 3 major appliances (in addition to the refrigerator and computers and stuff) in the same general part of the house. Bro and I had the steamer going full-blast while Mom was in the kitchen using the blender to make smoothies. Dad thought it would be a great idea to use the power saw at the same time.

The next thing we knew, all the power in the house was working at about half it should have been. As the steam from my steamer began to peter out, I could hear Mom & Dad ask almost simultaneously, “Why isn’t the blender/saw working?” We had to wait about 30 minutes and use our appliances in shifts before Bro & I got back to the wall again.

So anyway, anyone want to join me in our homemade sauna? It’ll be you, me, a lot of sweating, grunting, and some occasional shrieking and screaming. And at the end of the day, I promise you’ll be sore… ooooh baby!

Any takers?