Most used products: February

Sorry girls – it doesn’t get much more glamorous than this these days.

I have a couple of hours before H and the Ladybug get back from the little one’s music lesson so I want to start working on our living room, but I popped by to give you a quick status raport. Not only is the title of this post misleading, it also involves very little truth (we haven’t used most of those yet) – while we thought we’d be done tearing off the wallpaper in one day, the 50 year old wallpaper begged to differ. It has been quite a few days since we started and there’s still some wallpaper stuck to the walls, refusing to let go. Teeeensy, stubborn little pieces of paper
This is what we get to clean up after we finish working at 4 a.m. in the mornings – wet, dusty and soggy paper crap that’s all over the place and stuck to the floor.

We cleaned one wall almost entirely so I could try evening the wall out with spackling compound. To my surprise, spackling was absolutely doable and incredibly simple – although I have to say cutting my arm off with a dull rusty knife would’ve seemed like a walk in the park after five days of picking tiny bits of wallpaper off the walls. I spackled half a wall until tiny pieces of paper started sabotaging my work. Back to cleaning the walls it is then…

Meanwhile we’ve had the chance to find someone who’ll reupholster our sofa and armchairs for an affordable sum of money (it’s usually not the cheapest of services, to say the least). We also searched pretty much all the textile stores in Tallinn hoping to find fabric and after realizing that most of them would like 40€/meter for decent looking fabrics (we need at least 10 meters), I was almost giving up. Then our new friend the upholsterer told us about a magic place where fabrics are affordable and we left with 15 meters (we went a little crazy, but we wanted to be on the safe side in case they ran out and we needed more) for 2.90€/meter. Bang for the buck! It was nothing like what I had planned for the design of our living room at first so I had to rethink the whole colour scheme, but it’s still going to be magnificent.

There’s still so much to do – not only do all the walls need a coat of spackling paste, they also need to be sanded, then the ceiling needs to be washed and repainted, then the walls (all of them painted white, except one that’ll be covered in wallpaper), then our parquet floor needs to be sanded and varnished (which we decided to do on our own since the service costs 200€ and renting necessary machinery costs about 20€ – what could possibly go wrong?), all the old mouldings (why buy new ones when the old ones are perfectly usable?) need a little touch-up etc, etc, etc. Babysteps.

Right, that’s it for me. Back to work! Toodles!