"Have you wallpapered before?", asks the naive foreigner of any Russian person.
"Oh yes, many times," is the quip given back.
But the Russian method for wallpapering is like anything else in this country- no attention to detail, no accuracy. We were told that it would probably take us 3-4 hours to put up our paper. It took us about 18 altogether and we are exhausted. We are also very happy with the result. On Wednesday we proceeded to take the old paper down. Aidan (pronounced Aye-dahn) turned up unnanounced (very normal in Russia), so after a cup of tea we asked him if he wanted to join in. He did for a couple hours and then ate with us and was on his way. It took about 4-5 hours to remove the old paper.
On Thursday we got a start about 10:30am and by 3:30pm we were tired. As we had a prayer meeting that night we decided to stop for the day.
Today we just had to finish the job. Thankfully Monty, a friend from California came round to help. Having an extra pair of hands made all the difference. Even so it took the whole day from 10:30am to 6:30pm to finish the job, with a few finishing touches by 8pm. Why did it take us so long? (Well for starters, when we removed the old paper, we found so many imperfections in the walls, you would not want to paint them, it would take you a week just to prepare the room.) It took us so long because we wanted to match the joins (something Russians do not bother doing) and none of the walls were straight or square. In some parts plaster was crumbling, so we had to be extra careful. We could not do a plaster repair job, as we were afraid we would just lose the wall. Have a look at one of the corners and you will see that one wall is about 85 degrees against the next wall.
Anyway, we finally have finished our wallpaper. Now we have to find (hopefully) some cheap blue curtains to match. Melody has a plan to make some, so we should be able to pull that off. We think we will be in this flat for quite some time, so we may as well make it comfortable to live in. We hope you enjoy the pictures. I'm off to bed, and I have to speak tomorrow at ch. Whew!
2 comments:
looks imprssive. I love the map. not a view you get very often.
Well done on the wallpaper. just had to add Nickolai's view that perhaps you still have a lot of Russians to meet. We/he knows of many that do pay attention to detail and have wallpapered perfectly - well as far as possible over walls that are far from it!! :-)
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