…and I thought last year my cleated tennis shoes would do the job on my multi-acre hillside, especially with a new self-propelled push mower. Not so! Even the propellation (is that a word?!) wasn’t enough for this little girl. I used to watch my dad mow this entire yard, with seemingly little effort. Then he’d come in and take a drink of the sun tea he had made. I remember the first time I tried to tackle the job, after over an hour later with the upper hill still untouched, gritty and breathless, I thought, “he probably would have liked if one of us had made the tea and had it ready for him.” In later years he attached a piece of rope to the mower, to stand up a few feet and allow the mower to slide down on its own, then pull it back up with the rope, so he didn’t need to bend or walk so much. He did this the fall he had to have had the cancer, before we knew it. A dying “old man” still did a much better job than this relatively in-shape girl could.
I bit the bullet and put on my pristine pink Safety Girl boots, knowing the pretty toes would green up pretty quickly from grass. I was able to mow more of the hillside (all the way up to the second garden!) with these babies. I still can’t do the full job my dad did but I think he would have been proud of what I can accomplish.
I removed the extra handrails. Then I finished scraping the wallpaper and had two small DIY projects: drywall patching and stucco repair. You can see from the photo on the left, how horrid the wall was behind the paper. I remembered a trick from my days of actually building rooms from scratch. Smooth on a light coat of spackle to fill nail holes and other imperfections. When it is dry but not cured, run a damp sponge over it to wipe off excess paste and to get rid of the spackle edges. When it’s cured just a swipe of the sandpaper will do this way. Less dust, less work. I used a double-sided scrubby sponge for this task.
When I was removing the wallpaper, some of the DYI spray ran down to the first-floor ceiling, creating water marks. When I tried to wipe them off, the stucco itself came off! You can see the photos in this post. 
To patch quickly and easily, I just took the scraper I was using to spread spackle, loaded it up with the spackling paste, and dabbed it overhead onto the ceiling to blend in. Since the ceiling was white, there was no need to paint. Another way of doing this is mixing the spackle compound with water until milkshake consistency and dab with a large-holed sponge. Unfortunately I didn’t have that type of sponge and had to make do!
