Off with the walls! Or at least the paneling...

As many of you know from our guest blogger (Mom, aka Sita) on Sunday, my family is on their way into town to give me a hand around the house so I'm taking the rest of this week off starting today. Since my circular saw decided not to work as soon as I started the day's initial project, I began pulling the paneling off the walls of Isthmus House's downstairs living room instead. More on the downstairs bathroom tomorrow!

To be fair, the paneling in the living room wasn’t dreadful. It’s just dark in a room that only has one small window. Here’s what it looked like before I got started.

The wood was pretty easy to pull since it was just nailed in to wood slats attached to the plaster. I tried to save as many pieces with both the tongue and groove as possible but only salvaged a few. Behind the paneling was dust. Not mold! But, holy cow, a lot of dust.

Interestingly, it looks like the top portion of the wall was white at one point, then lime green, then white again and now, of course, navy blue. I have to wonder how it did with the lime but I suppose it would have been lighter and brighter than navy. The bottom color is a kind of pinky beige.

 

I vacuumed as much of the dust off as I could, but the room will definitely need a good scrubbing in the next couple of days before anything else happens.

Here’s what I’ve got now that the paneling’s down. You can see exactly where the baseboards used to be (the dark area). I wonder if they were ever painted.

Since the family's around, it seems like a good time to consider adding beadboard or a panel wainscoting all the way around the room in white – what color do you think the top portion should be? Leave me a comment - we're probably going paint shopping tomorrow!

Let's get it started

Well, I did it. It’s done. Finito. And by “done,” I mean started. I bought the House on the Isthmus, a 1910 American Foursquare I'm hoping to restore to all its … glory?

It was quite the adventure between the inspection (only a couple okay-ish sink traps and a water softener that we knew didn’t work?), the bank (excuse me? what was that number again?) and a last minute just-in-case Power of Attorney (a precaution against flight delays since I was scheduled to return from an international trip 14 hours before closing) but we got here.

The seller, a woman in her late fifties who seemed quite nice, had owned the house for almost 30 years and had some of the original paperwork from the house including the original survey. Granted, it had a couple of present-day pen notations added but I’m just happy it survived the last 100 plus years of being passed from owner to owner. I'll try to post pictures later.

The Roommate and I (not to mention our helpers) moved in last week. Things got a little heated once or twice but that’s bound to happen when you’re moving two households on little sleep until late at night. There were boxes absolutely everywhere but by now we’ve relegated a lot of our boxes and unneeded items to the basement.

The very first thing Laura, my friend who was at-the-ready to act as my just-in-case Power of Attorney/closing buddy, and I did was pull the hideous carpet out of the porch. Instantly, I liked the house better and it wouldn’t surprise me if that 5-minute act alone added equity. The carpet was really, really bad and really, really 60s drab brown. A good cleaning for that floor, which turned out to be parquet linoleum I think took an extra day.

Here's the before...

When we moved in the first night, I had no bed. More precisely, my mattress and the parts of my bed were in my “bedroom” (aka, the porch) but there was no way to get to the door, let alone to the components of a bed. I ended up sleeping on The Roommate’s couch in front of the porch doors. On night two, I dug in and gave my room my best shot at tidiness under the circumstances while The Roommate was out.

All in all, I think I did a pretty good job. My bed was put together on the appropriate wall, the dresser had clothes and linens in it, the shoe-putting-on chair made it under the far porch window and the bookcase was holding everything else. It’s a little cramped at about 6’8”x11’, but working for the time being. Next up for that room is probably either paint or draperies.

Since that first night, we’ve gotten the majority of the house put away – minus way too much Tupperware and some duplicate household stuff that’s probably going to the basement. I sold the chair that had been in my living room to a friend for 70 bucks and Laura’s holding onto my couch for a few weeks both waiting for her new one to come in and pending its sale on Craigslist.

We’ve also gotten most of it cleaned (a truly daunting task). My friend, Kaitlin, spent the majority of our first Saturday in the kitchen with us peeling truly hideous and dirty floral contact paper out of equally hideous and dirty cabinets - both in one picture below mid-removal. Don’t worry; we put down new, non-sticky contact paper before we put anything away. Before I go any further, have I mentioned how great my friends are?

Once that was sorted, I started in on some of the projects around the house. So far, some of the boring stuff has gotten done:

-     I sprayed for bugs – twice, since the skies opened up on a whim about 10 minutes after I did it the first time and they tend to be pretty bad this time of year.

-     I cleared the shower drain upstairs. Shame I can’t get the water to stop running from the faucet even when I switch it over to the shower. Puddle showering should be fixed soon! For now, I’m going to count my blessings that it doesn’t drip.

-     I bought the biggest dehumidifier I could find and hooked it up so it drains right into the sump pump since we were emptying it nightly for the first week.

I also changed the locks on the exterior doors, started gutting my downstairs bathroom and sanded down my vintage lockers to make them into additional counter space for the upstairs kitchen. Each was a new and interesting adventure – more to come on those soon!

I'll be posting on here as we continue the adventure!