Invitation to a Workshop: Simple Blogging

I want to invite you to a course I’m teaching Wednesday next week. It’s an online course so you can attend from anywhere you have an internet.

The topic is Simple Blogging, and it is about how to focus the time you spend blogging to get the most impact for your efforts. It will be part teaching, part interactive Q&A, and every participant will also get a copy of my e-book Simple Blogging.

With blogging you have a lot of short-term goals and demands on your time: emails, publishing deadlines, more emails, requests, and it seems like your blog is only as successful as your latest post. That and the late nights can wear you out and lead to blogging burn-out.

This online workshop can change the way you approach blogging. I will show you how to take a long-term perspective to make your blogging efforts more worthwhile, effective, and fun. It’s based on the time management principles in the Simple Blogging ebook, but we’ll cover more material as well. It’s for bloggers in every season, new or experienced, and I’m so glad the price is affordable.

The course is hosted by DIY Ministry. It will be live, so I’ll try to get the paint out of my hair by then. If that time next week isn’t convenient, you can still sign up and then watch the recording of it later in the week. Seating is limited, so if you’re interested go to the DIY Ministry site to sign up right away. Alright?

The picture at the top is one I just found in my photo collection. I don’t remember it at all. Don’t you love surprises like that? I also laughed at this one.

Frozen Fish Sticks & Creating Order in Disorder

I think what’s in your bag can be quite telling about your current season of life.

I’m at Starbucks because the internet hasn’t been set up at our new house. (Maybe it will be turned on tomorrow, I’m hoping.)

So I’m standing in line at Starbucks to order my drink, and when I reach into my tote bag to get ready to pay, I find a bag of frozen fish sticks in there. There are fish sticks in my bag! It’s not my snack. They’re not even cooked, they’re frozen! It’s just so ridiculous, and of course I can’t be subtle about it, I have to show them to the cashier who has probably seen worse but he laughs anyway.

When I sit down at my table the power cord for my computer has a piece of blue painter’s tape stuck on it from all the painting we did last week. I have to get a picture of this. What you don’t see is my purse full of receipts. It’s just a traveling file folder for this home renovation.

We haven’t moved into our house yet because of the construction; we’ve been staying in the nearby town. With all of the traveling we did this year, we’ve lived out of suitcases for most of the last nine months. It will good to get into our own home again. The movers are bringing our stuff on Thursday. There are a few things we’ve missed, and we’ll be happy to have our own kitchen where we’ll cook more than frozen fish sticks.

I’ve come to rely on basic routines so much this month as we drive back and forth between houses, storing necessary things in the trunk of the car, trying to keep some basic organization in place as school starts. School brings so many more small things to do, it’s unbelievable. Trying to remember everything such as how the school library books need to be returned on Fridays, and she needs white t-shirts for field trips. I need a place to put all the papers that come home every day. I don’t even have a table for her to do her homework.

What has helped me is the routines that I knew before but didn’t need so desperately until now. Things like:

Transferring all the information from school flyers to my personal calendar so I have a few less papers to keep up with.

The after-school routine of checking her take-home folder and starting homework right away.

Trusting my decisions to act on information instead of stacking up papers and waiting until later.

Making do with only five outfits for each of us and getting the clothes ready for the week on Sunday night.

Keeping our clothes organized in the packing cubes from our trip while we’re staying at other people’s houses.

Twice-weekly visits to the library for more kids’ books and movies.

Putting the kids to bed an hour earlier to compensate for the early wake-up call.

Night-time showers and baths so we can get out the door before seven a.m. without feeling hurried.

Chicken taquitos.

Knowing this won’t go on forever. Neither Doug nor I want to live in a project. We want to get it all done so we won’t have home improvement projects to do every weekend for years. We’ll unpack our stuff and have furniture and places to sit. It’s almost ready.

Today is a Better Day Than Later

“Today is a better day than later.” - Lane Grace Meeks, 5 years old

I can only plan today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

How to Remove Wallpaper from Unprimed Drywall

Is there anything more satisfactory than removing a strip of wallpaper in one long piece?

When we bought this house, we didn’t notice how many rooms were covered in wallpaper. “Oh, it’s only a few walls…”

When it came time to actually do something about it, we couldn’t believe how much wallpaper we were looking at.

I pulled a sheet of the original forty-year-old wallpaper just to see what we were dealing with. The top layer pulled away easily, but it left the soft paper underlayer, and under that was unprimed drywall, which is exactly what I did not want to see. Unprimed drywall is sheetrock without a paint coat, so the top layer is just a sheet of paper.

Before you apply wallpaper you’re supposed to first paint a priming layer over the drywall so the wallpaper can be removed later. Without that first coat, you’re adhering wallpaper directly to paper, and you won’t be able to remove it later without tearing it all up. That’s what Google said as I was reading about removing wallpaper from plaster walls or primed drywall, but when it came down to removing the wallpaper from unprimed drywall, every article said, “Good luck.”

Was I doomed to spend the rest of my summer pulling tiny strips of wallpaper off the walls in the back bathroom, just to end up having to spackle over all the gouges in the walls? Would I have strips of wallpaper trailing on my shoes and the feeling of glue on my hands for weeks?

I just could not do it.

Preferring the immediacy of a wrecking bar to the patience required with careful wallpaper removal, I quickly decided to take down two walls. “This will be good,” I justified, “Now we can put in insulation to soundproof the walls between the living room and the bedrooms. We’ll just put up new sheetrock and have new walls after this.”

But after knocking down those two walls and then looking around the kitchen and the bathrooms, I realized I could not pull down every wall with wallpaper. It was too much.

Through all of the demolition, the termite damage, the water coming out from behind the shower wall, the ancient air conditioner that struggled in the summer heat, and scraping up the vinyl floor, it was the idea of removing so much wallpaper that defeated me. We decided to call professionals and hire someone to remove the wallpaper in the kitchen. They would either remove the wallpaper or put up new sheetrock, whichever was faster and better.

I thought it would take the crew a long time to remove the wallpaper, but they did it quickly! And then I felt kind of dumb.

Did they use some kind of special wallpaper solution to dissolve the glue? No, they just used water, but there was one huge difference.

While I had been spritzing water with a small spray bottle, they soaked the walls with a compression sprayer for lawns and gardens.

It’s the water that lets you remove wallpaper easily from unprimed drywall without damaging it.

First pull off the top layer of wallpaper, and then soak the underlayer. Aim the stream of water at the top of the wall with the compression sprayer until water runs down the wall (for certain, have something to cover and protect the floor from the mess.)

Let the water soak into the underlayer for about ten or fifteen minutes while you move on to pull off more of the top layer on a different wall.

Let the water do the work, really get it wet and let it soak in and soften up the glue, adding more water if needed. Then use a scraper or putty knife to lift up the wet paper. You’re not scraping the wallpaper. You’re gently sliding the tool under the wet paper and pushing or lifting it away.

I wondered if the water would damage the wall, but most of water was absorbed by the underlayer of the wallpaper. The drywall did get wet, but it dried just fine. Best of all, there were no gouges to repair.

I was able to remove the wallpaper in my bathroom in just one afternoon. It made a terrific mess, but it was finished!