u s e y o u r h a n d s

That title? It’s literal. Well, maybe not falling so much. It’s sinking. Why? Because our 1920s bungalow was built on what’s turning out to be a massive pile of trash. No joke. We had a crew out the other day and they pulled out unbroken beer bottles, antique crocks, combs and more from underneath our slab. It’s turning a relatively simple shoring project into something far more complicated and expensive.

I know I should be thankful that we have a house at all, and that we live here with our five happy cats and perfect (albeit currently cranky) baby. But I can’t help to be stunned that the foundation of our haven is garbage and that it’s sucking us in. Symbolic much?

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.

The tile is down
LIKE THE DOLLAR OF MY HEART
What is next
Is not for ME to decide
But the corporations
The governments
The old, white, men.

That concludes today’s spoken word rant about the kitchen renovation fiasco.

For the past two nights, I have had two different dreams where I am murdered. These have been highly disturbing, not only for their content, but for their Law & Order-like details.

Dream One: Workplace Massacre

A disgruntled former employee is somehow enticed by a group of shadowy revolutionaries to shoot up my office. I narrowly escape being shot and am the sole survivor.

After I’m rescued, I offer to testify against the group on one condition — I can go into the witness protection program. The officer I’m talking with pulls out a video camera and shakes his head. He asks if I recognize him. I say no. He says he’s not a cop, but a criminal just a week out of prison. Then I recognize him as a man who assaulted and attempted to kill me. He draws out a gun and says, “I’m going to kill you four times over.”

How did he find me? The shadowy group of revolutionaries!

Dream Two: Similar, But Not Quite

In this dream, I get a knock at the door and man who recently got out of prison for assaulting me is there. Luckily, I push him out the door again. Before he comes back, to hack me to death, there’s all these weird scenes involving glitter-laden posters for a tranny-fronted rock band, blueberry pancakes, and a Jetsons-esque diner.

In both of these dreams, the part where I’m murdered loops and I try to make the action stop or change, but am unable. It is disturbing. I woke up after last night’s dream to find a cat curled between my knees sleeping so soundly I was convinced she was dead. I petted her hard until she woke up annoyed.

As I came up the walk into the house last night, I played a game where I only stepped on spots with no snow. Brian asked, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back?” “No,” I said, “Step on the snow and forensic detectives will track the print back to you and tie you to that unsolved murder.”