Take a look...

...this could soon be gone.
I know, there's nothing "Wow" about a plain white room with no pictures or fancy pillows, but believe me it's a big improvement. (See: "This wallpaper exploits women", Aug. 15.)
I spent the tag end of the good weather clearing, stripping wallpaper, repairing plaster, painting, stripping woodwork and installing new light to get us a real bedroom. Now, if we follow through on plans to DO SOMETHING about this cold, run-down pile, 10 years of DIY will be ripped out. Or the house will be sold, then it will all be ripped out. I'm okay with that.
Today I went to meet with a designer who specializes in strata conversions - turning houses like this into multi-unit buildings. Award-winning. One of his recent houses is going to be in Architectural Digest. After all these years of imagining what could be, and often being told it was nonsense, it was amazing to watch this man place a tracing paper over the original house plans and draw exactly the side-by-side duplex split I had in mind. All the challenges and questions about parking, sloping floors, excavating the crawl space, creating new entrance doors...all had workable answers. The cost estimates were lower than I had guessed - that never happens! I was told this house is a rare thing, a gold mine. A big house on a big lot with great "setbacks". If we decided to sell, not renovate, he said the developers would have a bidding war over it.
I left feeling like I was in a dream. Perhaps I was. I don't think anyone here is going to believe what I was told in there.