The Legal Bit

Jules rode his bike down to Chelsea Town Hall yesterday to get Isabelle registered and legal. Here she is with her birth certificate, with her two witnesses Godspeed the gorilla and Pablo the pig looking on. Look how happy she is to be legal! Can you see the little dimple in her cheek? Next week we'll go to the US Embassy and have her American paperwork done. Lucky little dual-citizenship baby!

So I mentioned yesterday about Jules and the guest bedroom. This is the bedroom where we were hoping to put my mom and dad when they come to stay next week. This is what it looked like when we moved in:



Ooh! Nasty! Do you like the patch of overgrown ivy completely covering that one window? I don't know if you can really tell from the photo, but the walls are covered in many layers of old wallpaper, the top one being thick and heavily textured vinyl. It's not that obvious in the photo, but there are patches where the wallpaper had curled away from the wall and that wall with the fireplace has been painted in royal blue gloss like a high school gym. Gross. Only an animal would decorate like that!!! So we knew it all had to come off before we could do anything with it. But like most things, we thought it'd be a lot easier than it actually turned out to be. Here's what the room looks like now:


Jules' arm is blurry in this picture because he was busily scraping away. It's a mess; as much plaster came away with the paper, and the plaster that's left on the wall is crumbly like old face powder. I think it was the paper holding the whole room together! So once again our dreamy neighbor Chris the Builder has come to the rescue and arranged for one of his plasterers to re-do the whole room for us. Sweet! We love Chris. Love him. So it might not be done by the time Grandma and Grandpa arrive from America, but it will surely be finished while they are here. Woo hoo!