That 70s Room

What the hell were they thinking in 1970? Huh?
This is a three bedroom house. The idea was pretty standard: one bedroom for us, and one bedroom for each of our two children. Children's Aid decided to throw a brick wall instead of a rug-monkey wrench into those gears, however. So now we've decided to make one room a library and the other into a guest bedroom. We've started on the library.
What it will be is a room with shamrock green walls and yellow curtains, filled with books and eventually a fake fireplace with a couple of wing chairs in front of it. What it is now is a mess.
We've stripped off the flowery wallpaper to uncover an absolutely unearthly shade of--
Well, wait, before I tell you that, I have to tell you about the house I spent from age zero to eight in: 1972-1980. We had the requisite harvest gold appliances, the barfy blue bathroom, and those weird floor-to-ceiling gold-flecked mirrors. The living room had (get this) dark brown shag with black diamond pattern, a grey faux-stone wall, a whole lot of wicker, and a bunch of disembodied plaster Negroid heads. And we thought this was the height of interior design. The mind cringes.
This slowly-becoming-library is worse.
Three of the walls are...how do I put this? Depending on how much sunlight's coming through, they can be the exact colour of earwax. Or they can be a more vibrant shade of yelpy yellow. Or they can resemble a neon pumpkin. Combined with a yellow carpet, the overall effect is that of a wicked hangover.
Stripping wallpaper...oh, now THAT'S fun. Why, oh why, does wallpaper come in two layers, a thick waterproof one and that cursed backing that sticks like KrazyGlue (tm)? Uck. The smell getting released as the wallpaper comes off is, as Vincent Price so memorably intoned in Thriller, "the funk of forty thousand years". Or thirty five, anyway. Dusty, musty, nicotiney, fusty, gusty, quite obscene-y.
Once this is done--and we're taking our sweet time, as time is not currently a problem--we will be filled with pride in a job we've done ourselves. It's unfortunate that there's so much work to do first. It's even more unfortunate that we have to do this work in a room filled with rancid 1970s eye candy.