Another One Bites the Dust

I'm not quite sure why I'm even posting these pictures since you can't really tell what's going on in them. Basically, we are trying to open up the floor plan of our apartment by widening the doorway to the hallway and making a passage from the living room into the kitchen. The impact is really dramatic - it makes our apartment look SO much bigger. Of course, I'm looking forward to when everything isn't covered in an inch of dust. I have headaches from all the damn dust.

This 140 year old plaster just crumbles and gets everywhere. When it breaks off you can see the Ox hair in it that they used as a binding agent. Ew. Still it's really neat to see the guts of your house. Once the hideous wood paneling came down it revealed this gorgeous Victorian era wall paper. Very bed-and-breakfasty. It's so pretty and I was hoping to be able to salvage a square to frame, but it is just too brittle.

Having a home where we can actually invite friends and family to have dinner or share wine still seems a long way off. Everything seems to be under construction. Good news is that the current contractor that is working on this project seems really great (unlike so many others that have bailed mid-project, doubled their estimates, or pulled any of the other typical contractor shenanigans). The last contractors that were working on our bathroom still haven't returned to finish that project and are using our apartment as free storage space for their tools. I'm ready to start selling their tools off.