I was ambitious when we first moved in, and started our first re-decorating project within two weeks.

Here is what this room looked like on the day we moved in:

On the wall to the right of the camera lens, picture a large, built-in oak desk and some old off-white pleated curtains with a pleated valance. Please note that the stripes on that wallpaper aren’t just stripes. They are floral stripes. Take in that sickly green carpet that must be at least 30 years old. The other rooms had their problems, but this one had incurred my special displeasure, and I couldn’t wait to strip the 80s away and make it new.

There is a crazy amount of wallpaper in this house, so I investigated methods for removal to try to identify the best one. But I found very little agreement in the world of DIY about how to remove wallpaper. Some people swore by steamers, others used liquid fabric softener. Some lucky schmucks were apparently able to just pull the wall paper off with little more than hot water and a rag. I decided to go hard-core chemical. I bought a giant bottle of DIF wallpaper remover, some rubber gloves, and some tools that proved indispensable.

We tried a few different scraper tools, and determined that this Zinsser scraper was the best option.

The blades can be replaced (and they will need to be replaced at least once if you have a lot of well-glued wallpaper going on. This tool was decidedly NOT the best option, and I would not recommend it.

The angle of the blade was all wrong, and because of the design of the handle, you can’t try to get it against the wall at a different angle. The handle was easier to hold, but alas, that made it almost useless.

We went through a few of these scoring tools, and I would highly recommend using these.

The little serrated wheels score the wallpaper so whatever you’re using to loosen the glue can penetrate through the paper.

This took a lot longer than I anticipated.

See all those teeny, tiny scraps of wallpaper on the floor? That is how most of it came off the walls. I’m whimpering as I write this just thinking about how frustrating that was. And it stuck to EVERYTHING. Especially the bottom of my feet, so we ended up finding sticky scraps of wallpaper all over the house. I would recommend removing any wallpaper before you replace flooring. It’s a good thing I didn’t care one whit about that carpet.

My mom came up (with my two adorable nieces) for the last week of March to help finish this project. My mom is a tireless worker. She did SO MUCH when she was here, and nothing ever seems too daunting for her. I, on the other hand, am lazy, and get discouraged kind of easily, so by the time she got here, my motivation for this project was flagging. I don’t know if it would have gotten done without her so Mom, if you’re reading this, THANK YOU!

We had to remove that built-in desk to get to the wallpaper behind it, and that was its own challenge. It was bolted to the wall and we couldn’t quite figure out how to get it out without damaging it. We knew that it had been built by the former owner’s son, and we just happened to have his phone number. Lucky for us, he gave us a very detailed explanation of its assembly and we were able to pull it away from the wall, and even better, put it back together when we were done.

We also removed that atrocious green carpet, which was easier than I expected. I just started at a corner with a pry bar, and (while wearing gloves), pulled it up, cutting it into strips with a box knife as I went.

It’s still satisfying to look at this picture of discarded carpet. Ahhh.

What we discovered underneath wasn’t as satisfying. I believed, perhaps foolishly, that there would be hardwood flooring under that carpet. The owner said there was! But there wasn’t. Instead, we found some weird brown tile that was etched with the markings of the carpet pad that had lain on it for so many decades.

We were a little baffled by this tile. What was it? It seemed almost like cork in appearance, but was way too hard to be cork. It wasn’t ceramic, and it didn’t look like vinyl or linoleum. We aren’t 100% sure, but we slowly came to realize that it could very well be asbestos tile.

Gasp! Cue screams of terror. We both knew there was a decent chance: the house was built in 1961 and we found contradictory information about when the use of asbestos tile really ended. We were never able to definitively determine what the flooring was made of, but we did see that it wasn’t broken anywhere, which seemed to be the real source of any danger with asbestos. We read pretty extensively and learned that as long as the tile was in good condition, and was going to be completely covered with another kind of flooring, it would in fact be better to leave it in place than have it removed.

So the maybe-asbestos tile stayed.

After what felt like years of wallpaper and carpet removal work, spackle-ing, and dry wall repair, we were ready to paint. We tested a few different whites, and decided on Behr’s Spun Cotton, a kind of warm white. Describing white paint is hard. Here.

We decided against painting the ceiling, mainly because it seemed like a huge PITA and the ceiling was already white. There are a few spots where I accidentally painted the ceiling, and you can see that there is a big contrast between the two whites, but it’s not that noticeable except in that spot. White paint is so weird.

I did learn something about painting trim and doors: It sucks. Because the paint on trim and doors is usually a higher gloss paint, you can’t just paint over it with another high gloss paint. It will peel off. We learned that the hard way. You instead have to sand it, and you have to sand it by hand because a power sander will apparently melt the paint. Wah wah. We actually still have to re-finish the trim in this room, which is peeling and chipped. I haven’t gotten to that yet because it sounds like torture.

But after a month of wallpaper removal, carpet removal, and painting, here is the halfway finished project:

It stayed like this for a few months until we could get to our next big project: installing new flooring. I’ll talk about that adventure next time…

 

 

Our house came with a lot of extras. When we were getting ready to close on the house, we did a walk through with the owner so we (he) could decide what he was going to leave behind when he moved out. We knew that it would be difficult for him to leave the home where he raised his family, difficult to get rid of 50+ years of stuff, both physically and emotionally, so Sean and I decided to just accept what he wanted to leave behind and deal with it later. While we did supposedly agree to what was going to be there and what was going to be gone, we found a lot more than we expected when we moved in.

Here is just a small sampling of what we found.

I have no idea how old this mattress is, other than too old. Please don’t overlook the green shag carpeting. The wallpaper is clearly impossible to overlook.

Sorry this one is blurry. The cross-stitched panels at the top of the built-in wall unit were hand sewn speaker covers. Notice the hanging dried flower arrangement: there were two of those. That blue couch was also not ours. Except I guess it was once we bought the house.

No home could be complete without a full set of The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau. This is tiny, tiny sampling of the books that were left behind. As though I didn’t already have enough of my own.

I don’t even know what to say about this one.

Dad was apparently right that we wanted it: Sean was stoked to find it, and yes, it is still in the upstairs bathroom.

And the pièce de résistance (or the coup de grâce, however you want to see it):

That organ was not supposed to be there. I really did not want to buy an organ. I was not happy about the organ.

Much to my surprise, Sean was very excited about the organ.

We still have the organ.

There was much more than this left behind. I don’t even think we’ve finished discovering all the things that were left behind. I haven’t even talked about the wood shop, fully equipped with a table saw, radial saw, band saw, joiner-planer, mitre saw, giant stash of scrap wood, old screws and nails, clamps, a big vacuum system, and about 70 different hands saws. The attic space above the wood shop that, we discovered, contained boxes and boxes of records from the former owner’s dental practice (and mountains of 20-year-old pigeon poop, which is a whole other story). The crawl space upstairs full of old issues of RV Living magazine. The end tables, small cupboards and cabinets, mirrors and wall hangings. The 40+ potted amaryllis in the sunroom.

So. Much. Stuff.

We’ve made progress getting rid of some of it. Sean has made countless trips to the dump. We sometimes argue over the value and aesthetic quality of the remaining pieces. That organ will probably be with me for the rest of my life at this point.

I can’t imagine what it feels like to dismantle a life you’ve spent over 50 years building. I can’t imagine looking at all of the things you have accumulated over your lifetime and trying to decide whether you still need them, or what to do with what you don’t. I can’t imagine standing in front of that house before you drive away for the last time, saying goodbye to the memories, to the home you spent nearly your entire adult lifetime in. I think accepting these left-behind objects was the least we could do if it eased that experience even a little bit.

And I wonder if any of these things will still be in this house when it’s time for us to leave it behind, ourselves.

When we decided to buy a house in December, 2015, we didn’t have any hard and fast ideas about what part of Sonoma County we wanted to live in. But there was one neighborhood I had a soft spot for in Santa Rosa. We’d been coming to this neighborhood to pick up our farm box for awhile, and I was drawn to the winding streets, the trees, and the older-but-not-too-old houses. It wasn’t a tract neighborhood where all of the houses looked alike, and it seemed peaceful and friendly. It seemed like a good place to have a family, with good schools and parks, and the commute to work for me was easy and very lovely, through vineyards and over hills with spectacular views. It was close to the parks where Sean does trail work and hikes, and there was a Whole Foods and a few good shopping centers nearby. It was more suburban than I ever imagined a place where I would live would be, but I’d more or less accepted my suburban lifestyle once we moved to Sonoma County.

There was a house in the neighborhood that had been on the market for awhile. It was at the very top of our price range, and the pictures on Zillow showed a very dated interior, but we decided to check it out; it was actually the first house we looked at. Here is what we saw.

I’ve always had a good imagination, and I could see the potential of this house right away. Yes, it was cluttered with stuff, and the carpets were surprising, and the wood paneling was extensive, and there would be a lot of work to do. But I could see what it could be.

We looked at a few other houses, but none of them seemed right. So finally, we came back to this one. On our second visit, the owner was there. He was an older gentleman who reminded me of my late grandfather, and he showed us even more of the house we hadn’t seen the first time around, like the giant wood shop and pantry, the paths down to the creek and the retaining wall he’d built with his sons, the way the upstairs bathroom could be turned into a dark room, and every detail of the home that he’d lovingly built with his family over the 51 years they had lived in the home.

After our second visit, we were in. We wanted this house. So we made an offer, and it was accepted, and all of the thrilling details of financing were negotiated and my parents came to visit and looked at us like we were crazy for buying this house, and finally, it was ours.

Then the real adventure started.

I mentioned that we bought a house.

We bought this monstrosity beauty two years ago this month. It all happened kind of quickly: In December, 2016, Sean determined that it was very likely interest rates were going to go up and that we should buy a house before that happened. We started looking, and ended up making an offer on the first house we saw. In late January, we signed our lives away, and by the end of February we were moving in.

It did turn out to be smart timing because, while we did spend probably more than we should have, housing prices have since skyrocketed in Sonoma County. Coastal California is a rough place for real estate. Everything is staggeringly overpriced, and after the fires we experienced here this past October, it has gotten even worse.

You may not be able to tell from the front, but this house is really big. It has four bedrooms, an office, a living room AND family room, a sunroom, and an enormous workshop. It’s on a third of an acre backing up to a creek, and there is a lot of stuff growing on that land. Like, A LOT of stuff.

The family who owned the house previously lived here for 51 years. And hadn’t done any re-decorating for the last 30. The house is in good shape, but it needs attention in a few key areas: We need a new roof, and probably a new furnace in the next few years. Not to mention removal of the excessive wall paper, wood paneling, shag carpeting, 80s-era brown kitchen tile and appliances, silly putty-colored paint, horrendous curtains, terrible chandeliers, and, oh, did I mention wall paper. Oh, and we need to put some serious energy into maintaining and re-doing the landscaping in both the front and backyards.

We definitely bought off more than we could chew. To be honest, this house has kind of been dragging me down lately. It feels like we never have the time or money to make the improvements that we need and want to make, we argue about what those improvements should be, and we’re a little bit muddling through the basic house maintenance stuff that neither of us has much experience with, like cleaning gutters and replacing air filters and cleaning chimneys and and and and and.

Part of my reason for jump starting this little blog is to rediscover my motivation to work on the house. When we first moved in we made some good progress right away, and then fell into the doldrums and haven’t done much else since, other than attempt to keep entropy at bay.

I don’t want to overwhelm y’all and try to cover our whole house story between then and now, so I’m going to break this up a bit. But if you want to see the transformation (oh god, I hope) of a 1960s ranch with a 1980s interior into the cool, modern house of our dreams, stay tuned.