Renovating the kid's room was a team effort. Jen's mom Karen and friend Aimee did a bunch of work to help. I mostly kept Jen out of the room due to unfounded paranoia about paint fumes, but she ended up helping a lot anyway, esp the molding.

Step 1: all that wallpaper had to go. Washing the glue off the walls is pretty miserable and left my arms aching, but I did discover that I apparently have quite a talent for stripping wallpaper.

Step 1a: check out the splotches of brown paint under the wallpaper. Really gives you that crackhouse vibe. Seriously, where are the receipts?

Step 3: patching. Jen's mom and Aimee patched innumerable holes and dents in the century-old plaster walls.

Step 3: priming and painting. Jen's mom is the all-time queen of painting ceilings (here she is scraping to make it extra perfect). Aimee is starting up the actual wall color, a pastel green. After the first coat it looked more like a lime green highlighter, but fortunately multiple coats and a good overnight dry made it look like we wanted.

Step 4: steam cleaning the rug. Jen borrowed her mom's steam cleaner and got out a bunch of old stains from the rug. Looks pretty damn good now.

Step 5: fixing the window. One of the windows was cracked and the ropes had broken so it couldn't be raised, so we got in a window guy to fix it up. (Thanks, Window Repairs In Your Home of Ramsey, NJ!)