When my husband and I bought our house many years ago it came with a big hole in the front of it. This hole served as a home to several families of neighborhood birds and also made it affordable to us and our shoestring budget. After moving in we hired some very nice contractors to evict the birds and fix the hole, mostly because the birds where not friends with the squirrels that were currently residing in our attic and also the hole created unwanted air conditioning in our master bedroom.

The hole was fixed right away and we spent the first summer in that house scraping and repainting the front facade but the damage done to the interior walls and the 85 year old plaster was pretty bad. We learned, like any good homeowners to simply stop looking at it. I parked a big chair in front of that wall and spent the next six years piling giant loads of laundry on top of it.

Last year the adjacent wall that lines the chimney also began to bubble and get soft, again a very nice masonry contractor came and fixed the problem but that wall continued to sit there and mock us with its damage. Eyes averted we continued to pretend that everything was okay.

Finally, with not so distant dreams of selling the house and buying something  more spacious and less water damaged we finally concluded the time had come  for action.

To that end, this past week my husband took off of work, moved our bed into our cramped back office/library/guest bedroom and endeavored to fix the problem.

My husband is awesome and has a number of excellent traits, working fast on a small deadline is just not one of them. He is… meticulous and precise in everything he does. When we first got together he once saw me making a salad by ripping apart lettuce all haphazardly with my hands  our relationship nearly ended there.  He brings order and organization to my otherwise chaotic and deranged life.

Needless to say I was dubious about how this whole project would go on a tight seven day deadline. I decided to document the experience – please excuse my blurry cell phone pictures (I believe I own the last phone manufactured without a flash) :

This is what our walls looked like pre-project:

When I came home from work on Monday night, this is what I walked in to:

When I arrived home on Tuesday, this is what I saw:

On Wednesday dry wall started going up:

On Thursday my sweet husband turned 39 and I found him in the shower drinking a beer when I got home (he got thirsty while showering – he wasn’t just huddled in the tub drinking alone) mostly he was celebrating getting this done:

We went out Thursday night to celebrate his birthday.

A quick side note to all of this: for his birthday I bought my wonderful husband a pair of slippers and a humidor. (Apparently I married my grandfather.)

On Friday I came home to find him painting the banister of our staircase, evidently the bedroom project was far enough advanced to move on to something else. I’m sorry but I didn’t get a picture of the banister.

Yesterday in preparation for his parents arrival (and my departure) later this week, we moved our bed and belongings back into our bedroom:

So now, I am referring to our bedroom as “Heroin Chic”… Maybe I’ll leave the really big chair that normally lives in that corner for the next owner. Two loads of laundry and you probably won’t even notice the wall.