Stripping!

I had the urge to do some DIY today so I sat in front of my house and started stripping wallpaper and flooring paper off in the attic.

This is what it looked like before. You can see the dark, mouldy patch where, somewhere along the line, we'd had a leak. It generally looked a bit dishevelled.

This was the stair case, minus the stair carpet that had been there, and the remnants of the old glue that stuck it down.

I managed to lift the staircase up quite easily by wedging a screw driver in the side and lifting it up. I was almost tempted to leave it and have it as a futuristic moveable staircase!! But, no...

This is the flooring that's going in. I think this'll probably go in every room apart from the kitchen where I'll have tiles. It's a cherry wood sticky flooring in strips that (I think) peel off a backing sheet and can be trimmed to size. There'll be more on this when it actually goes in!

Part way through the stripping process (below.) I'd planned on just doing the floor but the edge of the flooring paper was tucked under the bottom of the wallpaper where the wall and floor join. 

 I uncovered all the old wiring which was obviously copper and, over the years, had gone green. A lot of it was also pretty stuck down to the floor boarding and extraction may have to be finished another day!

I found this under some parts of the pink wallpaper - mainly on the middle section of the dividing wall. It's a green patterned wallpaper which looks like it only covered the bottom half of the wall and had white paint on the top half. It's as if my Granddad or Mum had started decorating like this then changed their minds and covered it all in pink wallpaper! Maybe mother could shed some light..?

So far, I've taken up almost all the flooring paper on both sides of the loft room and taken down 70% of the wallpaper. The wiring is going to take a lot of time I feel, as there are a lot of crossing over sections (as in the image below) and each joining part had a little metal peg in it (there were a few in the wall under the lights) which need to be pulled out with pliers. But at that point, I'd had no dinner and so left it for another day/time when I have more strength!

I think I'm going to get a little pot of white or off-white paint to repaint the ceiling and maybe inside the dormer windows and then I get to lay the flooring down!