Burning down the house....

Okay, so it just smoked a little. That's right, Kevin started the house on fire. Seriously, with the nice work on the fence and our finished bedroom, I was beginning to think we needed to change the name of the blog to reflect our mad skills. But I was brought back down to Earth today.

We were maybe ten minutes into the project when Kevin, who was on the ladder tackling the beadboard with the heat gun calmly asked, "Sarah, would you get a spray bottle?" I was busy into my own work, and told him just a second, until he asked again, this time with a little more urgency. That's when I looked up.

A comic (if you weren't us) routine followed, including a mad dash for the hose, running over to the burning corner, realizing the water wasn't on, and finally spraying from all angles and getting everything wet in the process. In case you are wondering, everything is okay (I can't even see where it's burned), and we live two blocks from the fire department, so even if we tried we would have a hard time doing too much damage. Needless to say, Kevin has been working with the heat gun on a much lower setting.
This is a shot of Kevin's progress for the day. The very corner, in the upper left of the picture is the infamous burned area. See? You can't even tell. The black area closer to the house in the photo is not from us. Wood rot??
Here's my progress form the day. The window is pretty close to being done, and will probably be done tomorrow, after I make a run to my sister's new house (they bought a Victorian) to give her rhubarb and onions. Finally, here is a close-up of the clapboard we stripped. It looks like it's in great shape, no?

More from the Spontaneous, Ridiculous Project

Here is a close-up of the fifties wallpaper. Of course I saved lots of it; it was just too...kitschy to throw away. There's even numbers on the measuring cup!

Here is the wall in all its painted glory. Colors never show up well on the computer, but it is more blue than it looks. Picture a sky right before it rains. The beadboard is going in this weekend. On a side note: see in the left-hand corner of this picture where the door frame is? That's the door to the basement. This is the thought process of our PO:

Wow, this wood paneling is going to look amazing. I should take down this old growth, beautiful trim and replace it with plastic. While I'm at it, I should put in fake wood trim on the door leading to the rest of the house, too. Now what to do with the door to the basement? What to do... I know! I can use a piece of the old door trim to top it! Beautiful!

Spontaneous Home Remodeling Gone Awry

So right about at the time we were finishing the bedroom, okay, right before we finished the bedroom, Kevin did a bad thing.

He peeked behind the wood paneling in the kitchen. That is me demonstrating the peek. We didn't get the original peek on camera.

Which sort of spiraled into an incident that included a crowbar...
And a Sawz-all...
And lots of fifties goodness.
See that fifties goodness? That is fake tile, of course.

We took it down to bare wall. The plan is to have bead board partway up, which we are almost ready to install. The walls are slate gray. I will post when it's done. We are calling it our concept wall.

We can't afford to redo the whole kitchen right now, and for that matter, we don't really want to. So we decided to do one wall. See why this makes no sense? What a ridiculous project. Are you with me?