Our house, in the middle of our street

Yes, our house is literally in the middle of our street. Hubby and I have been living here for about a year and a half, and this week we are getting down and dirty with home repairs. That is also the reason I am (unfortunately) writing this on his Mac. I can only see half of what I’m typing, so you’ll just have to deal with any errors.

We ripped out the carpet (by “we” I mean Hubby). We have bare concrete floors in the downstairs now, and it feels so nice and cool in this Texas heat. It is dirty right now, but that’s just until we polish and patch and stain it. This whole experience has led to some inadvertent detective work. When we moved in, the walls were bare white, and the carpet was seafoam green. Yuck.

The house is from 1983, but the carpet is not, meaning the previous owners CHOSE green carpet. It matches with nothing, and makes my beautiful moss green couch look tan (Dr. Stacey didn’t even know that it’s green). Working around the baseboards today, I found a tiny scrap of light brown carpet. Light brown! That means the previous owners (we’ll call them the PO’s for short) went from a sensible color of carpet to GREEN! Morons! It’s not that the color is horrible in and of itself, it’s that it matches with nothing. I can’t paint any of the walls anything other than blue, and combine that with green carpet and it would feel like I live in a fish tank.

I also removed an alarm sensor from the wall today. I don’t believe in paying a monthly fee to protect our free TV that only gets the Tejano channels. Under the sensor was a patch of taupe paint. This means they had greean carpet with brownish walls! Uck! It must have looked like the inside of a bayou that never gets cleaned out. (For you yankees, it’s pronounced BUY-you. It’s basically a drainage ditch with concrete sides to prevent flooding in low lying areas. There is generally stagnant water and at least one shopping cart in them. Houston is at sea level and therefore has hundreds of these, which is where it gets the nickname “Bayou City”.)

To top all of that, when we came to look at the house, their furniture was still here. The couch was maroon, navy, and yellow plaid. It was hideous on its own, but add it to the mix of green carpet and taupe walls, and that is one major stink-fest. I hope the PO’s are reading this so they can bitch slap themselves for their stupidity. Martha Stewart probably just involuntarily gagged a little bit without knowing why.

Did I forget to mention they installed flowered wallpaper in the bathroom upside down? It had flowers on it. Flowers grow UP. Plus, they didn’t even bother to cut the edges with scissors. They just slapped it up there, then tore it off by hand, leaving lovely jagged bits everywhere. They also did not smooth it into the corners, they just stretched it across leaving big warped pockets of air in the corners. You owe yourselves another bitch slap for that. I’m not even going to mention all that crap they left in the garage and closets. You selfish bastards are so rude, I hope a car falls through your new house.

If you are going to attempt home improvements by yourself, at least google how to do it first, and try to make it look nice and neat. This is your HOME. If you don’t put in the effort here, where will you? The idiots also caulked a kitchen window shut, which I then had to scrape open. Jerks.

Update: We just replaced our toilets this weekend with low-flows, and found more of the wretched wallpaper behind it! It pulled off easily, because there was MORE wallpaper behind THAT! Pictures will be added soon, once we reassemble our Evil Lair of Doooom!, I mean, computer desk.

September 16, 2010. Tags: carpet, home improvement, home repairs, paint, plaid, ugly, wallpaper. House Stuff, Random typing.