Sunday, October 05, 2008

Painting done (for now)

The bedroom is finished. When we first bought the house, it had some sort of grey/brown/green mix of color on the walls. It just looked dreary. Plus it made the house dark as all hell, as if the paint just swallowed up any light that came in.

That ain't gonna work. I like my light. So we repainted. The front porch was a nasty pink, like Pepto Bismol that someone threw up all over the walls. Hell no, I won't have a pink frikkin' porch! So we painted that as well. It's now nicknamed "The Romper Room". We painted the dining room and the living room before we had all our household goods delivered. The bedroom was the last big painting mission.

Because every other room I deal with is getting completely redone.

I don't know when this house was built. The papers during the sale said "60+ years old". Yeah, no shit Sherlock. The more the wife and I poke around and look at the house, the more I'm convinced that this house was built in 1910-1920. There's a basement beneath the front part of the house, but only a crawlspace beneath the back part, which contains the kitchen, bathroom, my office and the sewing room. (It's the third bedroom, but we've given it other duties.) The floor changes dramatically from the dining room to the kitchen. The wood floors in the third bedroom don't match the rest of the house. And there is a chimney in the kitchen, now enclosed and out of use, that could only belong to a wood-burning stove.

What is going to be my office was, at some point in the past, the rear porch to the house. They had some crappy beadboard hanging up as walls. Well, it was coming loose, so I pulled it back to see what kind of insulation they had in the walls. You know what I saw staring back at me? The original siding of the house. Painted green, no less, with the original window still sitting in it. All they did was put some runners up, built a wall to enclose the porch, put a window in it and called it good. I don't know exactly when it happened, but we found two pennies behind the walls - one from 1964 and one from 1972. So, they closed it up in at least 1972, maybe a little later.

It's going to be interesting when I redo it. I wonder what else I'll find. Everything we've seen while we've done our touch-ups simply screams turn of the century. It's been updated and taken care of, but I would bet that this house was build around 1910.

I think it fits us rather well.

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