The Archaeology of It All
I went to my doctor last week. She took one look at my sad, carpal-y hands with their nerve damage and muscle atrophy and put me on 24-hour brace use for the next three weeks. “And no more scraping,” she said, referring to the joy of my heart, scraping old mastic off Brian’s kitchen wall with a heat gun and putty knife.
What do I do now that the sheer joy of scraping the stinky, bubbling mastic off, to reveal cracked drywall, has been taken from me? Why, scrape something else! My attentions have turned to the spare bedroom. Brian refers to it as “Kitty’s Den ,” for someday, it will be my special room when I move in, slash, of course, spare bedroom. The walls are covered in layers of wallpaper and paint so think they’re pulling away from the wall. And this is an 80 year old house. I expected the worst.
In previous googling, This Old House et al. suggested a Paper Tiger. This bad-ass fucking tool is a disk with these multi-toothed gears. You glide this across the wall and it scores the paper. I got my putty knife under a good 1/8 inch of layers and layers of shit. Like a knife through butter, the old wallpaper came off in sheets. A wrist-friendly action, btw. It required level 2 of 10 pressure.
The patterns and colors of all the house’s previous residents were on display, layer by layer. On the bottom, the original owners had papered with a faded salmon deco print. Actual paper! Then several layers of paint. Sometime around the ’40s or ’50s though, someone got a little zany with the paper. One wall featured a bright pattern of red flowers with green foliage and the other a complementary blue and white striped number. It’s sort of gorgeous in the way things are when you don’t have to live with them. And then several more layers of paint. And a layer of plain wallpaper. With paint on it. I’ve done half a wall and uncovered most of the blue and white striped paper. The deco paper peeps out here and there.
I keep thinking about the people who put up the paper and paint. We don’t know who all the owners of the house were, but we plan on researching. But I feel so much excitement and energy in the paper. People decorating or redecorating their home, investing effort to make something their own. Or, looking for a fresh start that wouldn’t come with coat after coat of white paint.
We’re pulling all of it off, the hopes of others, down to the original drywall. It’s been nice to see what came before and I’m worried that getting rid of all of the memories this house holds will divest it of some character. That it will make our touches hollow. But that’s probably too deep, and it’s just old paper and paint. We’re ripping down mistakes and the actions of years of lazy homeowners. It should have been done years ago, I keep telling myself.
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Riminds me of wondering through our not-yet-completed condo, looking at the layers and layers of linoleum that had been laid in the kitchen (now our bedroom). You could almost gauge the era based on the pattern, going back to the ’20s. Pretty cool.
Incidentally, if you want to learn more about the past inhabitants of the house, you can go to the County Recorder’s office and pull up the records. All you need is the address and an hour or two to wade through the records (and that’s if they’re electronic; it’ll take longer if they’re still paper files). Here’s the Recorder’s website.