you mean this place has other rooms?

Since the kitchen is in limbo 'til the concrete trenches-cum-litterbox get filled (the concrete guys failed to bring the appropriate stuff for cutting a big straight line today), I've been preparing the family room and part of the living room for painting. What you're looking at below is kind of the back of the living room where the "dry bar" I hacked out was. There was all kinds of wallpaper residue nightmare there, which is why I didn't paint it with the rest of the room. You can't tell in the pic, but the narrow bottom section of the wall was a total tragedy with odd layers of weaved wallpaper and some kind of uneven plaster or drywall compound. I removed as much as I could and then rebuilt the wall there with lots of layers of drywall mud. It's taken me days of "apply mud, come back tomorrow, sand, more mud, repeat", but it's finally smooth and ready for paint. Yikes.

Moving along essentially the same wall, we have the family room, which as you can see, is still a lovely shade of shit brown, surely selected to make it difficult for the future homeowner to paint white. Hey, thanks! Anyhow, today I ripped out the grubby baseboards as well as the quarter round. My plan is to re-use the quarter round because it's stained to match the wood floor and not in bad shape, but I didn't account for all the little brads sticking out of it that are relatively impossible to remove. Not sure how that's gonna work out. Regardless, I'll buy new baseboards and probably paint them before I install them, which makes things look very tidy when installed. The big white glops on the wall are drywall mud where I patched various stupidity (i.e. random holes, phone jacks I'll never use). There's also a light switch that turns an outlet on and off that I'm gonna remove. Of course it's next to two other light switches, but not really aligned in any visually pleasing way. I'll never have a lamp on this side of the room anyway, so I'm gonna cut the wall, yank out the box and switch and wire the wires permanently in "on" position (resulting in a standard outlet) inside a small utility box that lives completely inside the wall. Then I'll patch the wall, do my magic and no one will ever know it was there. 

The walls in here will be the same white as the rest of the house, but I'm going to cover one wall in stained 1/4" Luan panels for authentic Eichler home awesomeness. If it works out ok, I'll probably do more wood walls in other parts of the house (hall and/or foyer). I also have to replace all the cheeseball beige two-prong outlets with black w/brushed silver plate loveliness. The super biggie project in here will be knocking out the entire bay window thing and replacing it with a sliding glass door, but that's a Keith the Handyman deal there. Not sure when I'm doing it, but the pool is currently rockin', and not having direct access to it is el sucko.