Some people should not own houses

While I am busy ruining my back working on the outside of the house, I thought this would be a great time to show you some of the heinous things the previous owner(s) had done to our beautiful house. Behold, some sloppy, dirty, and just plain ugly photos of the interior of our house when we first looked at it in April 2008:

Basement. Have you ever seen such a scary laundry area before? I mean, no one likes doing laundry but this area was enough to send the most dedicated housewife running away screaming and swatting the centipedes off her shoulders. Go ahead and click to enlarge it, I dare you! The floor! The interlocking rubber mats! The paint colors! The confrontational dryer coming out from the corner to attack you! The random old-school phone! Turns out those filthy rubber mats on the floor were covering up STILL WET concrete paint, several layers in fact. They had chosen wonderful shades like blood red, green, gray. While we were trying to clean it all up it looked like a Christmas horror movie.

So, what if you are doing laundry and suddenly nature calls? Well, what's behind door number 2? (heh, number 2) A state-of-the-art indoor outhouse, that's what! Genius! At least the toilet was new.

  

You would probably expect that the hallway leading down to this dungeon paradise was carpeted with gossamer strands and lit by sunshine, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong. It looked more like a hallway from a crack house.  Most of the walls and trim in the house looked like this. 

Front entry. Looks ok, right?

Until you notice this diarrhea paint color was slobbed on everything, the stairs, balusters, railing, doors, windows, trim, and as you can see - the ceiling. You can't see in the pic, but there was blue painters tape stuck on top of the railing there. FAIL.

Of course, paint just the trim and hinges salmon! It's brilliant! A real design statement!

Living room doesn't look so bad, a little bit of paint and you're golden, right?

Until you get a close up of the gorgeous oak floors that were detroyed by some sort of evil dog(s) that also ate a lot of windowsills and trim in the rest of the house.

Dining room. Despite the several different flesh tones that were painted on all the built-ins, walls, and trim, I thought this room was in great shape. Then I sat down in there the day after closing and said to my mom - what is that line on the wall? Yes, the entire room was painted-over wallpaper. HYSTERICAL SOBS echoed through the empty house as I realized that this was the case all over the house. The dining room, office/den, downstairs bath, front entryway, stairway, upstairs hallway, downstairs hallway were all covered with wallpaper. It set us back at least 6 months removing the wallpaper. There is a special place in hell for people that paint over wallpaper.  Especially when it was put over plaster without priming first.  But that is another post.

Den/office. Maroon crown molding, sage base trim and a yellowy-peach wall color? YES, OF COURSE!!! Brilliant. And please, go ahead and paint and caulk shut the gorgeous 12-lite prairie doors that are original to the house, no one will ever want to open those!

Upstairs hallway/walk through closet. What was that? You have a bunch of remnants of different carpets for 95% off? AWESOME - we'll take 'em!

Coming soon - 'after' pics!