If silence speaks, it appears that I have forgotten about my home improvement blog. Unfortunately, sometimes our best intentions are not enough to make the time available to do what we really want to do. Over the past couple of weeks, my emotions have been up and down. Mostly down, but things are finally looking up!
I spent almost two weeks cleaning the kitchen cabinets only to open up some of the first cabinets I cleaned and almost get knocked over by the stench! Okay, new plan. That seems to be the running theme in this house. I've heard people say when buying an older home to fix up that it seems that they are constantly running up against new challenges, and I knew it would be that way with our house, but it has been frustrating, nonetheless.
So now I am scraping paint off of cabinets like a mad woman to prepare the cabinets for a new coat of paint! They are wood, but I think there are ten coats of paint on them. My husband came in the kitchen last night and said he needed to come up with a new nickname for me as I sat on the counter covered in paint chips. After getting the kids in bed, my husband decided to take on a project that shouldn't have taken more than about 20-30 minutes tops. Saturday night, I had walked past the bathroom and noticed a huge puddle of seeping water coming toward me. I thought maybe my son had overshot the potty, so I yelled at him in the other room asking, "Did you miss, son?" He said, "What?" So I called my hubby in, and we discovered that the toilet tank was leaking all over the floor. He bought a kit to replace all of the tank innards. That was the project he undertook. Of course, he's replaced many toilet tank parts before, but after an hour and a half, he looked at me and stated, "This is supposed to be easy, right?"
Well, I stuck with him as long as I could trying to help him interpret the lovely directions that came with the tank innards, but after a couple of hours, I had to go to bed. I was about to fall asleep standing up, literally! But that was only after we had many moments of laughter. When he pulled the tank off, I said, "What is thaaaat?" He said, "Oh, you know, those make-up removal pads." There were a few of them stuck to the wall behind the tank. There were also pieces of wallpaper remaining so he pulled off as much of it as he could without the assistance of wallpaper removing chemicals, which I have to go buy for the kitchen.
While cleaning the kitchen cabinets I had thought that the part above the cabinets had been painted over top of wallpaper. Last night I decided to investigate and discovered that I had been right. I pulled off as much as I could, but there are still many pieces stuck to the wall. So after my hubby mentioned that he thought they tried to remove the wallpaper before painting in the bathroom, I commented, "That's some purrty wallpaper, there, I tell ya!" Then I discovered that my hubby's statement was only true for the lower portion of the wall underneath the chair-rail that had been put up at about the half-way point on the wall because you know in such a small bathroom we need to protect the walls from the chairs?!? I discovered that the upper portion of the wall had indeed been painted over wallpaper.
So we started joking that if we have a problem we should just paint it. I believe my hubby's comment was, "Got a problem? Grab a bucket and a brush and just paint it. Don't have a bucket and a brush, get you a can of spray paint and just paint it." Well, that led to more comments, including the fact that maybe we could seal that two inch gap at the bottom of the front door by stuffing a bunch of paint in there. And since the storm door has a huge gap at the top that is letting in a bunch of cold air (it is winter, after all), we could just paint it shut at the top as well. That ought to seal it good. Well, as it is, we sealed it with a towel shoved in the gap at the bottom and we just taped it at the top since we have left over moving tape.
Okay, so our situation is so sad that we have to find the humor to keep from crying. But it will get better and now I'm off to go buy some wallpaper removing chemicals and a spray bottle so I can get back to work and get rid of the wallpaper and at least nine layers of paint from the cabinets!
Happy Home Improvement!
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