The Hub has been steadily doing battle with the wrecked wall all day. In the process he kinda sorta wrecked the door to the office ( it has a small hole in it from being wacked with a piece of wood molding) Home improvement, such as it is, is nothing like you see on tv, where some do-it-yourselfer in a workshop with every tool known to mankind at hand solves a problem in 45 minutes.

As you can see from the photograph, the wallpaper/paint combo did not come off easily or well. We decided that, instead of trying to take everything down to the plaster, we would put up a kind of panelling, painted a neutral color - swan white. I love the names of paint. They're so soothing. So that when you finally are so frustrated that you upend the bucket on your partner's head he's such a PLEASANT color. Underneath, there's still a screaming,red man of course.

We haven't poured paint on each other yet - but, it's still early in the project.

Sometimes I feel like our entire marriage has just been one long renovation. Of course, the panelling won't go all the way to the top of the wall. It'll look more like wainscotting. The Hub will have to make a piece of molding to go along the top. Believe it or not, that's actually a more time saving solution than getting all the paint, glue and gunk off of the walls, which ought to tell you what a big deal that would be.

Tomorrow, I'm going to start painting the trim before I go to work. This is something I had planned to do last Saturday. At least nobody wanted to see the house today. Not only the kitchen, but the rest of the house, is a towering mess. All this because we tried to take down a wall paper border!

The dog is confused. Light bulbs are out in other parts of the house, where all the stuff that used to be in the kitchen has migrated. Something went wrong with the filter in the large aquarium so even our fish are downwardly mobile - we had to move them back into the smaller aquarium.

Oh well, at least we have a solution and we're working towards it. That is, if nothing else goes wrong.