Sunday, September 14, 2008

Old Pictures of Our House

I just found these old pictures of us working on the house in June 07 when we bought it and thought you might enjoy seeing the documentation of some of our efforts. This first shot is of me scraping the popcorn texture off of the ceiling. It had to come down since the previous owners had been heavy smokers who lived there for 17 years. To get this stuff off you have to spray it with water and then scrape it. We sprayed it with water, and it dripped off the ceiling the color and consistency of maple syrup, and smelled like a wet ashtray. Also interesting to note that I had to SCRUB the refrigerator/freezer because of the smell, and I even was scraping brownish tarry goo out of the inside of the freezer, behind the icebox. If the inside of the freezer behind the icebox was that bad, can you imagine what these people's LUNGS look like?
Since our house was built in stages, originally made in 1920, the floors aren't even. Owen did help the situation thus giving us somewhat even carpeting by nailing plywood to the floors in his office and our bedroom.
After the popcorn was scraped off the ceiling, all of the ceilings and walls primed and painted, all the woodwork lacquered, the cupboards disassembled, primed, painted, and reassembled, the refrigerator sterilized, all the carpet in the house ripped out and replaced, new flooring put into my office, new ceiling tiles put in the mud room, some of the floors leveled, the front door sanded down, stained, and lacquered (all of this was done in approximately one week, as we had to be out of our apartment but couldn't move into the house until these were done because of allergies and asthma), not to mention actually MOVING our stuff... We finally settled down to our first meal in our new house. Mac 'N Cheese.
The dogs spent the week of blitzing through the house outside tied to a tree where they wouldn't have access to buckets of paint. They had quite a time howling in code to the neighbor dogs like on 101 Dalmations.
Here I am mopping the kitchen for the zillionth time trying to get the dust from the popcorn ceiling up. I've never looked so much like a housewife.

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