Just take the money.

At the time I bought the condo, I'd decided I would do the following:

paint the dining room (because I hate the way it's done)
paint the living room (done well, but I'm so over yellow)
strip the paint and wallpaper off of the bedroom walls, prep and paint
Replace the moldings in the bedroom since they are so caked with paint they are cracked everywhere
Get the floors additional coats of finish

I got a quote for stripping/[paining the bedroom and I thought it was high. So today I tested to see how much I wanted to do myself. I bought the paper scorer, the paper remover, and some dropcloths.

Two hours later I was standing in a sea of latex-covered strips of wallpaper, with more still on the walls, refusing to come off. I swept everything into six garbage bags and decided that whatever I paid would be worth it.

A friend's boyfriend, a carpenter, is going to look at the moldings and give me a price, and I'm meeting with another remodeler tomorrow to get a quote on the floors, the bedroom, and the molding.

And I've decided I like yellow.

Oh, I should mention that this was after 2 hours in Evanston clearing community garden plots that are being used for The Talking Farm, so I was pulling out fencing and carrying wheelbarrows full of bricks. (I love the fat fortysomething women who see a task and say, "oh, we'll have to wait for the guys to do that," to be brushed aside by a wiry, garden-fork-wielding 70-year old woman who does the job in ten seconds. Age is irrelevant; attitude is not.)

Then to Rogers Park, where we were supposed to do some trash pickup preparatory to the Metra Garden project, to find that the guys from Dev Corp had taken care of that, and about thirty people were working on pulling out weed trees. I hung around for an hour pulling and pruning, and then had to go before my back gave out completely.

Had lunch, went to the condo, and scraped paint for two hours.


A hot bath, two ibuprofen, and a glass of champagne later, I don't mind saying I'm a little beat.