The house
The first major project we started in this house was to knock out the wall between the dining room and the kitchen. When we moved we brought our fridge with us, and when we got here we found out we could not get the fridge through the back door into the kitchen or through the dining room door into the kitchen. So Paul’s solution was to take the wall out! Then as we lived here a while and got the feel of the place we found that having the washer in a room off the back of the house and the dryer out in the detached garage was a little inconvenient.
So Paul’s next major project was to turn that wash room around and raise the floor so we had a laundry closet off the dining room where the water heater, washer and dryer could all fit together. That was not an easy project, and was not without incident but when it was finished we found that the ceiling paint in the dining room was peeling, all the way back to the original drywall. The only solution was to scrape the peeling paint off the ceiling, prep it properly and re-texture and paint.
As we were finishing that project it was time to turn to the peeling paint in other parts of the house. The master bedroom walls were the worst, so we got to work scraping. Paul had already added a larger master closet to that room and other then wall texture problems the paint in the closet was in pretty good shape, so we scraped the other 3 walls of the room, and as we worked our way around we found a plaster skim coat over the original drywall in areas for no apparent reason.
At this point in the wall the skim coat was floor to ceiling about 1/4 of an inch thick. The weird part was that it was not bonded to the drywall at all, it breaks off the wall easily in large chunks. Once we finished scraping the walls bare we had to lightly sand any residue off, and fill nail holes, even re-screw the wall to studs in areas where the original nails had lost grip, then prim. We have not gotten to painting yet, we are still recovering from the work up until now.
Throughout the whole summer I have been working on my own little side project. I have been taking the interior doors and stripping the horrible paint off of them. Then painstakingly sanding and refinishing them with several coats of polyurethane.
Before 
After
We found that these are the original doors to the house and the solid wood frames are cedar. This picture really does not do the finished door justice.
We just keep working away on the house, and will post more as we get more done.