Wall panels extravaganza

Remember the bedroom with the panels?

Yup, that's an emergency exit door.  In a bedroom.

Accordion-style closet door on the right.  Gag.

No, the color difference of the paneling is not from the lighting.  They are actually two entirely different style panels, in different colors.  Doesn't matter, they're out of here!

So T & E spent a few hours taking those panels out, and here's what they saw:

A failed black paint effort, covered up with mozaic-style tissue paper!

And this, on the opposite side:

I cannot look at pink and green the same way again.

I cried.  But I cried harder when I saw this wallpaper nightmare behind the fridge:

Ewww... I had to scrape all that?

Removing this particular wallpaper was just as bad as removing the twice-as-much painted wallpaper in the living room, especially since it's just gross.  I used my fabric steamer (Well, formerly fabric steamer.  It's pretty much ruined now.) to loosen up the glue, and scraped the wallpaper away.  The heat from the steamer and the general stinky-ness of the kitchen were not pleasant.

As long as we're still in the kitchen, here's a shot of another wall:

Somebody sure loves wall panels.

So we paid some painter to get the panels mudded, thinking we would just paint over it, rather than dealing with the suspected wallpaper underneath:

Apparently it was money not well spent, because our contractor suggested to get rid of the wall paneling altogether, because our fix attempt wouldn't last for more than a couple of years. So fine, let's take down the wall panels.

Thankfully:

No wallpaper!!

The house is finally free of wall panels and visible wallpaper.  I can now sleep at night.

The 60-year old tiles!

My husband "T" made sure that I disclose on the blog, that most of the demolition work is by him and his BFF "E".   So there!

It's true that they both put a lot of time, thoughts, and effort, without which we could not have done this much in a relatively short time, so THANKS guys!

Underneath the carpet that we removed laid the original tiles from 1950, sitting firmly (stuck) to the cement subfloor.  Here, you can see reddish-brown tiles under the mangled carpet (we were quite inexperienced in carpet rolling).

With an impulsive decision, we started scraping them away with a couple of floor scraper, one of which broke, so I had to run to a hardware store to get another one.  During my break errand run, the guys found difficulty with many, many stubborn sections.  Thankfully, being creative problem-solvers that they are, we did not give up and call the pros.  (One thing we won't do is to pay somebody to destroy our things.  We'll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.) 

Hammers to the rescue!

That's right, T and E ended up hammering the sh*t out of those tiles, throughout the whole house, while I scraped away what I could.  Was I concerned about the foundation being cracked?  Hell yes!  But what could I do... they needed the exercise. 

Here's one pile-o-tile from one room... and we had 4 roomfuls of similar waste. 

And the cement underneath.

Everybody slept very well that night and woke up with sore arms and chest.

Demolition DIY

The thing with DIY fixing is, once you get rid of a certain thing, be it wallpaper, flooring, etc, you invariably find other things that need to be fixed.  Soon, you end up getting rid of everything and starting from scratch!

That's exactly what we're doing (not intentionally).

The house was covered with industrial carpet.  Industrial in the truest sense of the word.... rough, heavy, ugly (gray-ish dark blue, ladies and gentlemen - the most potent color to enhance the dreariness of a house.).  It's in a pretty good condition, actually, but it has got to go!  See it for yourselves:

(gag!)

Somebody sure loved their turquoise.  And fluorescent lighting.

The turquoise wall on the other side of the room is actually painted wallpaper.  Apparently somebody didn't know care that you're not supposed to paint over wallpaper, because your buyer will absolutely hate you.  (True, I do hate whoever painted over this wallpaper).

One of the bedrooms was covered with wooden paneling on three of the walls.  Why just three, no idea.  I stopped asking questions a while back.

 (horror! How do you like the mismatched paneling?)

So we ripped off the carpet, padding, tacking throughout the house and those wall panels.  Here's the pile of rubbish to be hauled away. 

(There's more carpet in each bedroom.  The bright light is not heaven shining down... it's the skylight.)

Good riddance - we're done with demolition!  Or are we?   More to come!

New old house

Apparently I can't get away from blogging after all.  I think it's that desire to be heard, regardless of whether anybody is actually paying attention.

This blog is created to document my home improvement and DIY efforts (my sewing blog is here).

Long story short, husband and I got the key to our new house - old "new" house - last week.

Here it is, perched on a slab concrete in its full glory:




*scramble around for pictures*





Um....





Well, apparently among the many pictures I've taken of this house, there's none that shows a full shot of the front of the house.  We'll have to make do with this:

(up to front entrance)

Some Sears salesman must have scored big time... the whole house is covered with vinyl siding.

Once the former occupants moved out, we realized there's a LOT of work needs to be done to bring this house up to our expectations.  A "lot" as in more than we expected.  The day after we've got the key, we went to work right away.  More to come!