A Journey of a Thousand Miles

 

I'm sure you're familiar with that profound little nugget of wisdom: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

If you aren't familiar with it, now you are. You're welcome! Also, I looked it up to see where it came from, and it's attributed to a (possibly apocryphal) Chinese philospher. 

So there's that.

The particular long journey we're going to talk about now began over a year ago when we bought the abandoned house next door. We only bought it because we didn't want anyone to move in right next door to us. We're real friendly like that.

A. had thought he might someday fix the house up, because it's a hand built adobe and stone house and A. is a self-taught stone mason, but it wasn't high on the list of priorities. 

Cleaning the house out, however, sort of was.

The house had last been lived in by an elderly man who moved out to live with his granddaughter, and quite a lot of the contents of the house were still in there. 

It was a little creepy, to be honest, what with the man's clothes hanging in the closets and personal things like poetry written by the granddaughter still on the walls of her bedroom. It was also disgusting, because all the old blankets and things had made very cozy nests for rodents. 

The kids always wanted to go over there, and they always wanted to take something out to bring home here, and honestly, it was gross and a pain. So we needed to clear it out.

FINALLY, last week, I rented a dumpster.

Here's that very first single step.

It looks like a big dumpster, I know. It is a big dumpster. There was a lot of get rid of.

Last Thursday, A. and I just dove in. 

We began with the detritus in the rooms. Clothing, papers, stuffed animals, blankets, particle-board furniture . . . 

Well. Why don't I let the photos tell that story?

Living room.

Bathroom.

Kitchen (the least cluttered room in the house).

One of the three bedrooms.

It was so gross to be touching all that stuff. My face was set in a permanent expression of disgust the entire time. 

But that was nothing to what came next, as A. started tearing out all the old carpet.

Good thing everyone has plenty of face masks around all the time now.

Getting rid of the carpets made an immediate improvement, because there are few things more filthy than 50-year-old carpeting.

That same bedroom, minus the appalling pink carpet.

The dumpster was filling up rapidly.

We are definitely going to fill this.

A. was on a roll--and also curious to see the actual structure of the house--so he then started pulling off wall paneling. It was the same kind of cheap particle board paneling that was on the walls of the living room in our current house when we bought it. And underneath, we found the same kind of perfectly acceptable walls that definitely did not need to be covered up with that nasty stuff.

In the case of the kitchen, there were actually two layers of paneling.

Right to left: The top layer of horrible grayish paneling, the middle layer of horrible brownish paneling, and the actual wall that was painted an appealingly cheerful yellow.

A. had to stop at this point, because he was exhausted from pulling up and hauling heavy carpets. But the demo was only beginning. 

Stay tuned for when the ceilings came down. Literally.