(1) When I was younger, we lived in a huge three story house on an acre (?) of land. It was a magical place. My sister and I had the top floor, which had low, sloping ceilings and a tiny bathroom with a sink and a toilet. We once thought we were stuck in that bathroom, and stayed in there for about an hour, yelling out the tiny window to our mom. Turns out that the door was just closed funny and needed a strong strong push.
(2) My favorite room of that house was a room that was between the family room and the downstairs hallway (I think) and it was full of bookshelves. My mom used that room for her crafts and books and other stuff that I, in my youth, didn't know about. (Now that I'm an adult, I realize it must have been bills and files and such, but please don't tell me the truth, and let me keep my idealistic childhood memories.)
(3) When we moved in to that house, it had several layers of very ugly wallpaper on the walls that my parents wanted to remove right away. It was a long process. The dining room alone had three (or was it four?) layers of very difficult to remove paper. (To this day, I have an aversion to wallpaper. I like borders, as they are very easy to remove if you decide you don't like them anymore, but the earth will shift off it's axis on the day I decide I want wallpaper in any room of my house.) My dad, in a stroke of genuis and bravado that my sister and I will never forget, brought the garden hose in the house and hosed down the walls to get the paper really really wet. My grandmother had a serious fit about that.
Stay tuned - I'll do three more things about that house next week!
6 comments:
What were you and Joy doing in the bathroom together with the door closed?
i love the hose part. sounds like something that my dad would have done. i remember when my parents were taking wallpaper down in their house. it too was awful wallpaper and i too hate the stuff.
Victoria brought the hose into the house once, but it wasn't to remove wallpaper.
A three story house would be awesome.
my mom wallpapered our house from top to bottom when it was fashionable (?) to cover every surface including the kitchen ceiling and wall vents with wallpaper. when we were all teen-agers, the blessed day arrived when she determined that we would all remove it... a "family work day" she called it. A work week more like it. my brother and I got sloppy and got the walls so wet that the drywall chipped away and then we had to repair that too.
Our house had gold flocked wallpaper in the dining room. Nice. Just a couple of walls, though. My mom just soaked it in wallpaper paste. That actually worked really well, just scraped right off.
On another note, isn't it funny how we cherish our memories of houses and other places. I dreamt of the house I grew up in for years after we moved. I think about it now, it was a tiny, tiny 3 bedroom house. Nothing special - but it was home.
What is it with wallpaper? We, too, had wallpaper -- but the previous (original) owners put it up on any and every wall except in the concrete basement. When my mom finally had the time/money/bravado to remove the paper it was a 3 month (my summer vacation!) process which included a steamer, magical solution the hardware store lady sold her and hours of chipping away with putty knives. I think we found 4 layers in one small bedroom -- and one layer had 3 different types of wallpaper! EGADS! I cannot even begin to describe the amount of foil, felt, velvety paper that still exists in that house.
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