hey, i haven't said it in a while...

[swingchickie]

i really hate the previous owners of this house.

every time i think i'm on top of the house issues, i discover something else that makes me want to scream. 2 years in to owning this place and it's still going on.

this weekend i'm going to start doing an overhaul on the 3rd bedroom, which i've hated from the moment i moved in... it used to be their baby's room, and they really went all out with the ugly colors -- dusty blue, dirty pink, and mustard yellow. every surface in the room, including the ceiling, is glopped thick with bad colors of really cheap paint. then there were the glow-in-the-dark stars that they put all over the ceiling -- a few weeks ago i pried off the ones i could reach, which took chunks out of the blue ceiling paint. so when jack came over last night to help pry off the remaining ones and putty the holes, i was crossing my fingers that we could do it easily, and that'd be it.

of course not.

issue #1: we discovered that the thick gloppy paint was painted over wallpaper. i had thought that the couple of peeling out-of-reach things i saw were paint, NOPE! it was peeling wallpaper. instead of steaming off the old wallpaper before they painted, they took the lazy route and just slapped on several coats of paint. and i just don't have the money to pay a professional come over and clean up those walls, steaming off the wallpaper through the paint and sanding everything down to start with a clean slate. so we have to add to the paintlayers. sigh. trying to clean up those peels in order to make it decent for painting meant having to tear chunks out of certain areas and then putty it. but hopefully that'll hold everything together and it'll be at least better than it was before.

issue #2: for reasons i don't understand, there was some sort of rubbery adhesive that was spread from top to bottom along both slides of the doorjam. it almost looked like they had used rubber cement instead of caulk. so i spent 90 minutes last night rolling off little boogers of yellowish glue all the way down the door; i actually have blisters on several fingers this morning. while i was tediously picking it all off, i flashed back to what my painter had said soon after i moved in: "these people ruined your house and left you to fix it". jack's quote: "if you ever meet the realtor who listed this house, slap them in the face."

in a sliver of good news, jack and i pried up a corner of the ugly blue carpet in there and discovered that the hardwoods underneath are in pretty good condition. so i'm going to cancel the carpet i'd just ordered and we're going to expose the wood floors instead. that'll save me about $600 and the floors will match the rest of the house. whew.

Comments

[inkuwait.livejournal.com]

Your place sounds like it was owned by the same people who previously owned my sister's home. He fancied himself a handyman who knew how to make repairs with masking tape and knitting needles. All of the refurbishing/remodeling the previous owners did to the house were done in a bassakwards manner. My sister and her husband are still trying to undo the messes the previous owner made.

[dontcallmemolly.livejournal.com]

As a memeber of a housepainting family, I urge you to reconsider just puttying over the holes in the wallpaper. It will just add to the problem in the long run. You don't need a professional to strip the old wallpaper. It souns like a lot of it comes off easily so you could probably scrape it with a putty knife. You can also rent a steamer from Home Depot to soften the glue yourself. It might be kind of time consuming, but I know plenty of people who've done it themselves, and you'll be so much happier with the end product.

PS - your house is one of the reasons I have nightmares about buying :)

[xtingu]

I've heard mixed reviews about removing wallpaper. My folks removed all the wallpaper in their whole house in just a few hours-- they said it was effortless. However, removing the chicken border in the kitchen of our house was a god-awful nightmare, taking the elbow-grease of four people, solvents, acids, and screams of frustration. Maybe borders are just more grippy than wallpaper, I dunno.

The previous owners of our house was silicon-caulk-happy. There is silicon caulk farkin' everywhere, and you can't paint over it because the paint just beads up. Gargh! I'm pretty sure our house is held together with a couple thousand tubes of caulk.

I'm so sorry you're battling with your house. If it's any consolation, I think it's really awesome and cute. :-)

piggyback

[ms-violet.livejournal.com]

I also think your house is awesome and cute, and I'm happy to hear that the room has good floors. Watch this end up being the room you love the most by the time you're through. We have hellawallpaper in our house too and some of it was painted over by the previous owners, which V. didn't figure out until after he bought the house. here's the other wallpaper-removing trick which I've heard works, but have never tried; liquid fabric softener.

I hear Jack already saying, "Tell them to come over and do it, then."