As I soldier on towards the eventual goal of getting my bathroom painted, I am astonished how a house less than 40 years old can have this many layers of stuff. And I mean LAYERS.
When we bought it, the house had been sitting empty for a while, so at the very least I expected some redecorating just in the name of freshening things up. The main bathroom, though...everyone's first reaction on seeing the bathroom was along the lines of 'oh, that's too bad...'. At some point, a previous owner took textured wallpaper, tore it into random pieces, and layered it all over the bathroom walls. Over a previous wallpapering job. Textured wallpaper...in chunks...random...overlapping... I do not know what thought process led up to this, but it must have been done fairly soon before we bought the house, as the first time we turned on the hot water in that room, half of the wallpaper bits peeled off, and the other half became an integral part of the drywall. Two years on, and I'm just now getting enough of it off to get that room painted like a (relatively) sane person lives here.
In various other rooms of the house, we discovered that wallpaper borders had been put on top of other wallpaper borders, with layers of paint intervening. Then there's the kitchen...
The cat kept getting stuck to the kitchen floor, because when the dishwasher was running, it heated the floor enough to make the adhesive vinyl tiles sticky and loose. Out of curiosity, I popped one up and discovered that instead of being stuck down to the sub-flooring, there was a solid cream-colored vinyl floor underneath (which was great, because the rust-colored tiles didn't really go with the kitchen anyway). So, my mom and I peeled up all the tiles and scrubbed off the adhesive as best we could (tip for those of you trying this at home: Pine-Sol is fricking made of awesome. It's like the anti-duct tape.). While doing this, we took up the threshold strips at each doorway and the floor heat vent, and discovered....drum roll please...ANOTHER LAYER OF FLOORING. I'd been wondering why the carpet transitional strip seemed to go up from the carpet to the hard flooring. We don't know if the first layer is salvageable yet, so I want to to wait to take up the cream-colored stuff just in case we have to end up putting in a new floor from scratch, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there was yet another floor under that.
The crowning moment of WTF, however, was when we had the original wood shake roof replaced with composite roofing. Correction - what we thought was the original roof. Someone, rather than replacing or fixing the original wood shake roof, put another entire wood shake roof over the top of it. To quote Family Guy: "Pie? Drunk? The?"
On the bright side, at this rate, once I finally get everything cleaned up, my house should be several square feet larger than when we bought it.
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Now playing: They Might Be Giants - Kiss Me, Son of God
via FoxyTunes
Thursday, November 19, 2009
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