South City Confidential

The Money Pit

I’ve been relatively dark because Chris was on spring break and we are doing some long-overdue home improvements. We’ve been in our house five years now, and we’ve not done much since we painted and such when we moved in. Since our house is around 90 years old, and the deadbeat previous owner (no, seriously, dude paid back taxes with a bad check so we could close, and we get repo notices all the time on his truck STILL, five years later) rehabbed using the cheapest methods possible, and we were suckers when we bought, there is work to be done.

A few years ago, my dad (who works in the flooring industry) pulled up a corner of our frat-house carpet and found crumbling linoleum; unusual, since most old houses in the city have hardwood. We’ve been meaning to put in new floors since then. On a whim last weekend, we pulled up a different corner and found hardwood. The linoleum was only in one small area. Granted, it’s scuffed, staple-laden damaged hardwood, but hardwood all the same. So instead of having new wood floors installed, were going to take on the arduous process of endless sanding and finishing.

Listen, I’m glad to do it. We pulled up all the carpet and padding so we could pull out the errant nails and staples Johnny Rehab used to fuck up the house install carpet. The amount of dust and grime was astounding. I heard somewhere that dust is 85% dead skin, and that thought refused to leave my consciousness as I rolled up stained carpet pad. I could deal with the carpet being dirty and nasty, but the thought of how many people we were breathing in on the regular nearly set me over the edge. The house just feels cleaner without carpet.

Once we moved most of the furniture, pulled up the carpet pad, and removed all the sharp protrusions, (of which there were many, as in the weird conservative NRA guy we bought from included “staple gun” in the long list of weapons Obama is surely trying to take from him), from the wood floor, we prepped for and began painting. When we painted the week we moved in, Chris and I fought like dogs and I questioned why I was moving in with some dude who was such a damn perfectionist when it comes to painting. This time, while Chris was still a perfectionist, we worked together quite well and enjoyed our time together. You may not know this about painting, but there are lots of opportunities for “that’s what she said” jokes, so that was my strategy for dealing with a man who really, really wants the corners to be perfect.

We aren’t a neutral-type couple in terms of home decorating.  We went from primary orange and yellow to a more muted green and blue, and repainted the trim and hallway white. We’re not doing the floors until Chris is done for the school year, but they will be dark, and we’ll stain that wood trim on the stair the same color.

Yeah, I know my couches are kind of ugly but they are comfortable and I’d rather have a new stove instead of new couches, so deal. We took the baseboards off because we’re putting in new ones, so those will be gone until we finish the floors.

I also fixed up that there ceiling fan, which was WAY uglier with brass fixtures. We took the fan down, I took it apart and sprayed the brass parts with Rustoleum to give them matte chrome finish and cleaned the whole thing, making it look way better than it did before, because brass looks like grandmas. This bitch is HANDY, y’all!

Long story short, we spent a lot of time at Home Depot and Home Eco. I now know about quarter round and orbital versus drum sanders and various costs per linear foot for different baseboards. Sisters are doin’ it for themselves.

Up this week: a regular posting schedule, thoughts on HCR, news on our school and Texas yayhoots trying to revise history. Onward!

Tags: home repair

KBO posted this article under life on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 10:37 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.