Our New Old House

Hi all,

I haven’t written here in a very long time and I’m so sorry to have left you hangin’. We rushed up on a deadline to have the house appraised last month and so we did TONS of work but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now.  But don’t worry, I took pictures!  I have no idea what order anything happened in now, so I’ll just go room by room and get you up to speed.  Let’s start with the bathroom today.

When last I blogged, the bathroom looked like…  this!

There was still some wallpaper residue on the walls so Brandon scraped it off.

Then he scrubbed the walls to make them ready to prime.

With this latest push to get work done on the house, we’ve had to cut some corners in the short term so we could have it appraised. We haven’t abandoned all our long term plans yet, but in the interest of time and sanity, we had to just give many things a quick going over to make it look clean and finished for the bean counters. Hence, everything got painted white and we had to come up with some quick fixes for some problems with the walls.

For example, in the bathroom we want to put beadboard paneling on the wall below the wood trim that splits the top and the bottom half of the wall. We didn’t have time to do that so my friend Tiff (who’s a GENIUS!) suggested that we put contact paper on the walls as a kind of temporary wallpaper. So that’s what we did.

I guess it’s time for a before and after look, huh?

Before:

…and AFTER:

Oh, I just noticed that the spot under the sink where the pipes go into the wall looks a lot better now in real life than it did in this picture.  This was before we did a little more work to clean it up.

But anyway, that’s the bathroom, getting close to being done!

And here’s a bonus photo of Brandon scraping the hallway wall (coz I don’t know where else to put it.)

[tags] bathroom, wallpaper, ceramic tile, paint, paneling, photos, future plans, flooring [/tags]

Will the wonders of my kitchen ever cease?  Maybe.  I worry I’ll start to miss the disgusting walls and the gag-me-with-a-spoon froo froo trim.    And then I start pulling it down and the act of destruction solidifies my rage over the tragedy that is the decorating job done to this poor old classic house.  Case in point:

Behold! My kitchen. It sucks. But not for much longer. Here you see the stupid trim (as I’ve taken to calling it these days) on the left and the area where I pulled the stupid trim down on the right.

Some fascinating wallpaper choices. Just fascinating.

Is that strange golden grainy stuff on the wood sap that has oozed out of the wood?

Anyway, trim is coming down and a new drywall ceiling will be going up very soon.

[tags]wallpaper, photos, kitchen, ceiling[/tags]

Phew! What a busy couple of weeks it’s been!  I’ll have lots and lots of blog posts coming your way to tell you all about everything (with pictures!)

Today I sent a response to the lady who used to live in my house.  When I wrote to her last month she sent me back a really nice letter promising to look for some pictures for me.  In the meantime, I’m sending her photos of some of the puzzling wallpaper in this house to see if she remembers any of it, and also some photos of the clothing I found that must have belonged to her family. 

 Stay tuned for blog posts about replacing our storm windows, upgrading our furnace and adding A/C, a recap of the March Des Moines Rehabbers Club meeting, and much much more!  That’s all for the news.  Film at eleven.

[tags]neighborhood history, wallpaper[/tags]

This weekend, one of my new friends, Dan, came over to help work on the house. Dan’s a librarian (as I hope to be someday!) and appreciates learning about history through learning about my house. We actually got some work done while Dan was here, but once I started on a project in the basement, we got a little sidetracked. I’ll come back to that.

I can’t believe I’m still working on that first door I started stripping, but I am, and I know how to do it more efficiently the next time around. I didn’t get all the paint off the carved edges with the heat gun so I asked Dan to apply some CitriStrip to the areas where there was still paint around the edges. While he did that, Brandon installed our new gas dryer. The heating element went out on the one my uncle gave us and the belt broke on the one that was in the house when we bought it, so rather than pay just about the same amount to repair either one of those, we bought a new one at Sears. I can’t believe how quiet it is! Brandon did a great job, even getting creative with duct tape to make a different sized vent tube fit the existing vent hole. Red Green would be proud.

Meanwhile, I started work on another round of insulating the basement walls. If you remember at the beginning of winter I put some foam insulation around the cracks in windows and spaces in the foundation. There was a large amount of cloth stuffed into an area of the coal room that I just assumed was to keep the coal dust from traveling into other parts of the house. Well, I was wrong about that (and it was really an assumption made out of laziness. I didn’t want to have to deal with pulling down those rags.) The rags were actually put there originally to keep out drafts. When my sister’s boyfriend came over last weekend, he laughed and pointed out a bad gap in the foundation. “Why would you go to all the trouble of putting foam around the window when you’ve got daylight coming in over the foundation?” Well, that’s what comes of having tall people around to give me better perspective. From his point of view he was seeing a gap several inches wide that was leading directly out to the front yard.

Pretty embarrassing. So this weekend I added to my list another round of insulating.

Here are the rags stuffed into the crack.

As I started pulling them down one by one I realized that these were mostly whole pieces of clothing. They had rips and tears, but were pretty much intact. The first couple of pieces turned out to be a woman’s slips that she’d wear under a dress. I tried to guess from the cut of the slips when they were from. They had that beautiful “on the bias” shape and so I figured they must be from the 30s or 40s. The next pieces I pulled down were baby clothes: a felt jacket with a safety pin still attached, a little girl’s dress sized for a two year old, and a pair of button-up pajamas with an elastic flap in the back for using the toilet. There was a large wrap-around summer dress in a bright red floral print that must have belonged to the mother of the family, and a dirty old pair of jeans that must have been the father’s.

Dirty old jeans:

Mother’s apron (top right) and baby’s felt jacket:

Little girl’s dress:

Little girl’s pajamas:

Father’s boxer shorts:

After I got the clothing down, I unwrapped a water pipe that had been bound in denim and newspaper. To my delight, the newspaper was in excellent condition and was largely intact. There were two dates on the newspaper: 1934 and 1942.

Dan caught me taking a few minutes to read the news from 1934.

After all the fun we had in the basement, we went upstairs to work in slightly warmer conditions. Dan and Brandon scraped wallpaper in the hallway while I wet sanded some of the plaster in the front bedroom.

Also, I scraped another little section of the dining room floor. Inch by inch, we’re getting this house done!

Pick-a-little talk-a-little CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP! 8/28/07 Tags: wallpaper, photos

Fans of The Music Man will recognize the subject of my blog post. Anybody who hasn’t seen The Music Man, just know that it references a song that is guaranteed to get stuck in your head if you hear it once, so consider yourself lucky for not getting it. (Now that I don’t work in Mason City, Iowa, the inspiration for River City in The Music Man, I’m FINALLY allowed to say I’M SICK OF THE MUSIC MAN!!!)

Now, on to the post!

That afternoon, Grandma came over from down the street and helped me scrape the paint off the wallpaper in the back bedroom and continue my progress in the dining room. Plus she brought me quesadillas for lunch! Can’t beat that!

She did get exasperated at my method of working on a little piece of each room at a time and said I move around the house too much. “You’ve got to do one room at a time!” she said. “But I’m bored of this wall. I want to work on a different wall,” I replied. She just shook her head and laughed at me.

Before long, I had moved on to the wallpaper in the kitchen. That was a lesson in home decorating mistakes of the past. First of all, when I came on the scene, the kitchen sported a coat of the nastiest “Harvest Gold” paint made only nastier by the dense layer of cigarette tar that darkened the color from “Harvest Gold” to “Baby Diahrrea.” I knew going into it that the paint was put on top of wallpaper, and that there were several layers of wallpaper over the plaster. What I didn’t realize was that the odd stripes here and there under the paint were actually masking tape. Whoever painted had put masking tape over each seam of the wallpaper, presumably because the wallpaper had begun to peel off. This was to my benefit, though, because it was easy to slip my razor blade under that and just start peeling away big chunks at a time. After that, the Downy made short work of the many layers underneath.

Here are some wallpaper pictures:

Kitchen:

Dining Room:
Grandma working on the dining room:

Hallway:

Front bedroom:

Grandma tried using mineral spirits to loosen the paint. That worked a little, but we’re going to try something a little stronger next time.

[tags]wallpaper, photos[/tags]