During

It was a dusty horrible job involving a lot of sanding and hole filling and re-sanding.  Painting and stripping.  Stripping and painting.  Our vacuum cleaner broke because it just couldn't take it anymore.  So Sam swept the carpet when it became too much to bear.  After four weeks, we are officially done, but before we reveal the after pictures, we want to share some of the durings...

The stress caused Sam to go grey prematurely.  

Here you can see some holes we filled in the hall downstairs:

Remember that big gaping hole with horse hair sticking out?  Look at it once Sam attacked it with plaster repair!  See that beam in the bottom of the picture?  Scroll down a bit to see how it looks now...

More holes filled:

The guest room without  5 layers of wall paper or foam or foil, but before being painted. 

We sanded down this beam that was previously hidden beneath the wallpaper underneath the banister.  It's very very nice.  We also decided it was silly to paint over the nice wood beneath the beam so we stripped it and sanded it to add a little extra somethin somethin to the stair case.
Here is Sam melting the paint away.  We had to cover the smoke detectors so they would stop shrieking.  An interesting discovery we made during this time was that whoever installed the smoke detectors did so in a way that we cannot get the cover off to remove the batteries--they're too close to the wall.  Which left us scratching our heads and wondering how we will ever replace the batteries...  But anywho.

Nice eh?  

Here you can see the almost finished product.