I missed this past weekend's engagement post, I was working on a project and kept getting sidetracked from giving the post the attention it deserved. I was quite disappointed when I realized I'd missed it, I hate to pass up a good opportunity to rant (and argue about rants :D). Since one of the rants I'd intended to go on dovetails nicely with my project from last weekend and what I will be working on this coming weekend, I figured I might as well go ahead and make a post about it. I've been saving this up since the weekend, so don't say I didn't warn you!
My project over the weekend was removing an untold number of decades worth of wallpaper from the walls AND ceiling of a bedroom. For reasons that I cannot fathom, the previous owner(s) had seen fit to cover the plaster walls and ceiling in layer upon layer of wallpaper, with an occasional coat of paint thrown in for good measure. If you've never had the privilege of scraping wallpaper, especially when it's such a long time resident, let me assure you that it is anything but easy going.
My phone's memory was just about full and I forgot to take photos until we'd already started cleanup so the one above is all you'll get to see of the process but everything in the floor in that photo is fragments of wallpaper. We had a steamer and if it wasn't for that this would have taken forever and a day to get done. It was basically a plastic tank with a heater and a hose running to a rectangular plastic tray which trapped the steam when you held it against the wall.
As long as there wasn't too much paint in the way and you held the tray against the same spot long enough the wallpaper came off fairly easily. If you got in a hurry or there was plenty of paint it required multiple steam & scrape cycles to get down to the bare plaster. With one steaming and the other one scraping we made pretty good progress until it came time to tackle the ceiling. It'd been most recently slathered in white paint, which made it much more impervious to the steamer than the walls had been. Repeated cycles of steam & scrape eventually did the trick but just as the end was in sight the steamer had a meltdown (quite literally, the bottom melted out and the power cord tried to fuse to the extension cord). We managed to finish the ceiling the old fashioned way, with warm water and rags taking the place of the steamer.
This brings me to the rant I'd alluded to earlier, namely why do people half-ass it on projects they're working on, especially when it is in their own home? Years ago I was building maintenance for several 100+ year old Victorian homes in Old Louisville that had been converted into apartments. Working on those, I could see the high level of workmanship and attention to detail that had went into the construction and early repairs on the houses, as well as the progressively more shoddy work that had been done as time had passed.
Why do people so often 'phone it in' and do the absolute minimum when working on a project? So often the difference in effort between doing a job and doing it well is marginal, so why is 'barely acceptable' the usual result? I wasn't being paid to go the extra mile but I was still being paid by the hour so taking the time to do it right didn't hurt a thing. This isn't just the case with DIY projects or jobs either, steemit definitely had a bit of an issue with this as well...
I'm fortunate in that I grew up making and building things and playing with power tools and machinery, so I don't think too much about working on things myself. I can understand when inexperience and unfamiliarity with what you're doing results in less than stellar outcomes but that doesn't explain a lot of what I've seen over the years.
Those of you that do DIY projects, what keeps you from half-assing it? Who out there is a fan of 'good enough for government work' style approach to projects? What's the worst 'an attempt was made' old college try effort at a project y'all have seen?
This weekend we're cleaning, priming, and painting the room so wish us luck! Assuming I don't get too high off the paint fumes I'll catch y'all in 
