Oh the weather outside is???.......

More freaking snow. It snowed early in the week, then we had a 1/2" of ice, then more snow on top of the ice. I am waiting for the power lines to give up the ghost and start breaking at anytime. Now the rest of the weekend is suppose to be a high of ZERO. Yeah I am bitching about the weather and I know I live in Northern Illinois, but I have to bitch about something, we have a Governor that got caught red handed selling a Senate seat and refuses to step down, not much I can do about that either, and I never voted for the bastard anyway.

Well, with a spurt of the cash flow I was able to work a bit more on the front porch. I still have to trim out the painting  but I think it turned out ok thus far, and to me that's all that matters.

Here are some pictures of the project:

I bought some paint for the living/dining room today, I picked a color called called (get this) Butterscotch Candy! A normal person would call it pumpkin. So my intent is to paint two of the four walls this color and I haven't decided on what color the other two walls will be. So for reference, the West and South walls will be Butterscotch Candy, and the North and East walls are mostly windows and a fireplace. But both of these walls need to be stripped of their paneling first and I am not sure that I want to do that just yet.

Yep so I am sitting here and the wind has really picked up and the lights are flickering, and I just got a call from work through our automated system that my servers are on battery backup and fading fast.

UPDATE: So I head into work late last night and being as though all the doors are electronically locked, and the computer that controls then is now on battery backup, I can't get into the building. After driving around to the back I was able to get in the back door the old fashioned way, with a key! Then as I made it to the door to the data center it is locked electronically and I left the key in the car, so back outside in the wind and cold to find the key and back inside. I finally made it into the data center and the power came back on. The short of the long is it wook me longer to get to work, get in the data center than it did to actually do what I had to do once I got there.

Cold

Well we got about 3-4 inches of snow yesterday and last night. Of course, being as though almost all the villages and municipalities blew their salt budgets last year for this year most of the roads are frozen over and pretty nasty right now. Funny I am watching the History Channel and they are talking about? salt? A whooping 95% of all salt in the US ends up on the roads and the rust it causes to cars? $115 million dollars a year, or $115 per car, and we as a society consume 15 lbs per person per year.

So I descended into the basement and got the first coat of poly on the door casings after dinner tonight, I grabbed a can of spray foam and filled in more holes and when I turned around the first coat was dry to the touch. So what I am saying is it is real dry in the house right now.

Ok so I needed to take a small wallpaper border off the wall, here is the tool that I used

What it does is score the paper (nice wallpaper huh?) Then you take liquid fabric softener, any brand you like but I prefer the cheap kind and spray it over the wallpaper. I use straight fabric softener, not diluted and let it sit for 5 -10 minutes then using a putty knife the wet wallpaper literaly falls off .

This is the final view after the paper is off.

Make sure you score the paper well with your tool, this allows the softener to penetrate more effectively and get behind the glue. If the paper is not totally wet when you go to scrape it off you need to spray more softener and let it sit. I will tell you that what ever you buy at the home improvement store that bills itself as wall paper remover is either fabric softener or has the same ingredients as fabric softener. So hit up Walmart and buy a generic bottle of fabric softener and save some time and money.