The quantum physicist decorates his house

Not strictly true, but the gist of this weekend. A couple of parents came up for the weekend to help demolish the hallway. It seemed slightly silly, as it's the "room" that gets used least, but hence the area that we were most unlikely ever to tackle without moral support, and to be honest I think that we were both afraid that it was the wallpaper that was holding the house together. We were partly right.

On Saturday we spent a happy day stripping the delightful wood-chip wallpaper with the help of the parents' wallpaper beast, covering ourselves and most of the house with sticky glue. The cracks in the wall weren't as bad as we had imagined, but it was slightly dissapointing to discover that in putting in the window, the barbarians had managed to destabilise a large area of plaster and half of the ceiling. The piece de resistance (I can't find how to do accents!) was on getting the wallpaper off the ceiling to find that the plaster board that was the ceiling above the stairs was only joined to the actual ceiling in a couple of places and the gaps had just been covered with stretched wallpaper. Definitely sub-optimal. We were pretty tired after all that, so we ate dinner, the parents retired to their B&B, and we, in a fit of not knowing what to do with ourselves, went to see In Bruges, which is offically one of the best (and funniest) films that I have ever seen!

Day 2 was assigned to trying to deal with the mess that we had made, so we had an exciting trip to B&Q to which I was allowed to drive (and no-one seemed shaky-legged due to fright!), and then played with expanding foam! This was definitely the way to deal with bits of wall that no longer met other bits of wall - much easier than crafting carefully cut pieces of wood in wedges! And it made a wonderful mess - a cross between really light meringue and something from a Dr Who episode. Then we learnt how to plaster and started to fill up some of the more alarming holes in the wall. It was at this point that we started to doubt the relevance of our education and considered that maybe some practical skills might have been a useful foil to quantum theory and nuclear physics. Nevertheless, we were able to prove that removing wallpaper definitely causes the probability wave of the walls to colapse, and that knowing the rate of movement of a wall was no help in establishing its position.

Now we have a very narrow, long hall way which is almost very beautifully plastered. We only have to deal with the ceiling before we can re-wallpaper. But considering that we don't have a weekend free now for about 6 weeks, it looks like it might just be a lick of paint for the time being.