Our First Christmas

This weekend concluded our first married Christmas together. This is my fifth Christmas in what is now our house, and it’s gone through a couple of changes. I used to put the tree in the front window, which normally required a bunch of furniture moves, and usually required that at least one chair and a side table go upstairs into storage for the holidays. Last year, I decided to put the tree in the large opening between the dining and living rooms. Jenny and I were busy planning the wedding, so this seemed to be a good compromise so that we wouldn’t have to spend time moving furniture and disrupting normal life. We liked it so much, that we decided to do our first Christmas the same way.

As we get ready to begin work on restoring our living room, it was both a little sad and a little exciting to take down our Christmas tree. This was the first step to getting the room ready for moving the furniture into the dining room (so that we have some temporary living space).

Starting this weekend, the furniture is going to move, then the curtains are coming down. I’m getting some plastic to hang in the door openings to keep down the dust and junk from migrating. We’ll probably use the side window in the room to get construction debris outside. Once the room is prepared, the first major thing to go will be the drop ceiling and its support structure. Then we’ll start on the easy wallpaper, followed by the difficult wallpaper (the easy stuff is below the drop ceiling, and the difficult stuff is above–the stuff above is six or more layers of really old wallpaper, possibly down to the original paper in the house). The last two steps to get the room down to “bare” are stripping the woodwork and removing the carpet. We’ve decided to try doing both in this room. We didn’t do either step in our first full room (the dining room), mostly due to time and my own trepidation. I think we’re ready now, though.

This weekend is going to involve a quick trip to the wonderful Home Depot–we’ll be getting a heat gun, some appropriate paint stripping apparatus for it, and plastic sheeting for the door openings and to protect anything we need to protect.

Here’s to some (more) fun!

– jonathan