One of the fascinating parts about moving into a house when you've always lived in apartments is the simple idea of multiple rooms. The fact that your bedroom no longer needs to double as your office. Or that your living room no longer needs to double as your dining room. All these books we have with titles like, "Living in Small Spaces" or "How to Fit 1200 Square Feet of Crap Into a Single 12' X 12' Room" are no longer as useful to us. I mean, we still have smallish rooms, but at least there are multiple smallish rooms. And a basement. And that makes all the difference. We'll keep the small-spaces books around, you know, so we can refer to them smugly and point at them and laugh from time to time. But mostly they'll be relegated to the harder-to-reach shelves.

It's hard to break old habits, though. And that might be one reason I'm currently officing in the dining room - some ingrained need to make the most efficient use of space. Or it might have to do with the fact that we don't have any dining room furniture. But if I had to take a guess, I'd say the main reason I'm officing out of the dining room instead of the room properly referred to as 'The Office' upstairs has to do with the large holes I made in the plaster walls only a day or two after we moved in.

The office walls were always a bit strange. We knew this before we bought the place. They were 'bubbly' and there was some strange particle-board wainscoting going on in there. We figured the bubbly stuff on the walls was painted-over wallpaper, and the wainscoting could probably be made a little more aesthetically pleasing with a good sanding/painting. We were partially correct about the wallpaper. There was, in fact, wallpaper on the walls. And it had been painted over. At first I thought maybe I'd just sand out the bubbles and paint from there, but then it became clear that the best thing to do would be to remove the wallpaper. There were a couple of tears in it, and when I pulled at it, I found it peeled away remarkably easily. I pulled off the old wallpaper on one entire wall in no time. It revealed a second wallpaper underneath, this one with cartoon images of Davy Crockett on it, the leftover artifact of a boy's bedroom. It was not pretty, but it had been applied to the wall much better, and I figured I could probably sand down this surface, prime it, and paint over Davy no problem. So I kept on pulling the outer layer of paper off.

That's when I discovered that the 'bubbles' and soft bits were about more than just the wallpaper. There was crumbling plaster behind this stuff. As I peeled back the wallpaper on one span of wall, I uncovered a soft spot about the size of a fist. No problem, I thought. I'd just spackle it up and paint over it. So I pulled some of the plaster out to make a neat square. But the more plaster I pulled away, the more the plaster around it crumbled. And pretty soon I had a 2' x 2' foot square hole which looked directly at wood lattice work beneath it. Hello, 1915.

I was now at the point of no return. I went on to find more 'treasures' in that wall. Creative carpentry. Patchwork from the last 90 years. Adolescent graffiti from a boy named Rich who must have lived there sometime in the 80's. On the one hand, it was strange and fascinating. On the other, somewhat macabre. There's a spookiness that comes from uncovering these remnants of people who have lived in a place before you. Perhaps it's because you don't know these people and so they seem akin to ghosts. Who was this 'Rich' kid? Where was Rich now? Was he still alive?

As I looked around the room at all this, catching whiffs of old house through my protective face mask, the realization began to sink in: this room would need more than a good sanding/painting. This room needed Work. With a capital W. Some drywalling, skim coating. Perhaps even a few carpentry repairs. Nothing too difficult, but enough to make it more than a simple weekend project. This room would need to be put 'on hold.'

And that's why I set up shop in the dining room.

At first C and I thought we might hire a contractor to do the work in the office. But this weekend we were inspired by C's cousin Alex and his father JR. Alex bought an old house in Montreal about a year ago, and they've completely gutted it and are in the process of putting it back together. It's incredible that they're doing it just the two of them (along with some help from family members.) Of course it helps that JR is an electrical engineer and Alex has a penchant for putting things together. But still. It's amazing. Of course, the downside is that since it's just the two of them, it takes more time. They've been working on the house for the past year, and there's probably at least six more months to go before Alex and his wife can move in. Luckily, they've been able to stay at JR's house until the renovations are complete.

Anyway, if Alex and JR can rebuild an entire house, C and I (and maybe some willing friends) can certainly put the walls of a room back together, eh? Pizza and beer offered to any takers.

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