The Joys of Homeownership (that word looks wrong but spell check didn't object).

The joys of homeownership swept over the Thornton-Naughtin household over the weekend. Michael tackled the grass, the round-upping of weeds, cleaning the gutters, and of course, continued on with the task of pulling nails out of the particle board that must be removed in preparation for hard wood floors. Here are some shots of Hubbie in action…

(Yes, he likes to wear tall socks with shorts and tennis shoes. I have decided to fight other battles.)

I do not want to mislead readers and have y'all think that the above picture is candid. He was pushing the lawn mower up the hill, but he was not smiling AT ALL before I held the camera up. The pictures below show you why he is really crying on the inside.

Our house sits on top of a steep hill. The type of hill that makes you question whether your car is going to make it all the way to the top when you are about halfway up the driveway. 

These pictures also show you the amount of work the yard needs. That is mostly going to wait until next year though. This summer we are focusing on getting the inside ready for our new addition (BABY FRANCES!!), and we will focus on simply cleaning up the yard and maintaining it until next spring/summer. 

In addition to following Michael around with a camera, I also tackled the wallpaper in Frances's room. Seeing as Frances will have an actual cat, who we fondly refer to as Kit-Cat-Quick-Snack but whose actual name is Bella, we did not think that she needed cat wallpaper in her room.

I used two tools to get the wallpaper down. The first is a wallpaper steamer (pictured below). My dad bought this a couple of years ago, and it set collecting dust until last week. I am really pleased with how easy it makes this. I generally have to go over each section twice. The first time I remove the top layer and then I go back and steam off the wallpaper backing and use a putty knife to scrape it off the wall. I really just glide the knife under the paper and it peals right off. (Please forgive the lack of pictures. I meant to take some that would make that explanation clearer, but… after scrolling through all of my pictures, I now realize I must have forgotten.)

The second tool you need for wallpaper removal is…

a reluctant helper. She was in charge of morale, and it was not a job she took seriously (notice she is in a completely different room and is just waiting for someone to take her home). Steaming off the wallpaper was not hard, but it was time consuming and pretty monotonous. Below is an after shot of the bedroom.

Overall, an extremely productive weekend. I hope all of you had a great weekend too!