old house. new home.: The Kitchen. (and more vomiting.)

Here's a little story.

It all started with a nail. It was late. It was Saturday night. We had just gotten back from dinner and a few drinks at a local bar and grill. It was 10pm or later. We had spent the morning running errands, and the afternoon drilling, screwing (actual screws with screwdrivers), and hanging the kitchen cabinet doors, among a few other household chores. The cabinet doors - they look like shit. The just-painted paint had started peeling. The cabinets themselves looked pretty good, but the doors, well, they don't look so good. I had blisters and had ripped my pants on the (crappy) kitchen flooring while hanging a lower door. We were both beat and frustrated. We decided to rip up that nail from the floor that we just always in the way. It ripped pants. It scratched sock-protected feet. It just stuck up from the floor, mocking us as one of the last bullshit annoyances left to us by the people who owned this house before. We've hated it since we moved in. So, Pat pulled up that nail and tossed it in the garbage. Then, we found another nail, so we pulled up that nail too. Then there was another and another and another ... and then we wanted to see what was under all that laminate, vinyl, and sub-flooring. So, Pat started demoing. We ripped up a piece of laminate flooring about 2'x2' that night, along with the same size padding, vinyl, more laminate, and sub-flooring. Underneath it all, we found the original hardwood floors. As expected though, they were toast. ruined. glued. damaged. moldy. I had held out about 10% hope that we'd find great floors down there. No such luck. Oh well.

Forward to Sunday. Pat starts ripping out more of the floor because ... well, we've demoed part of it, might as well take it all out. As we try to get the laminate, faux-hardwood out, we peel off the "baseboards" (baseboards = glued on pieces of rubber that are typically used in restaurants or commercial spaces = super ugly). So, I tear off one piece of baseboard and look at the back. I only look because I had to really pull to get that sucker off of the wall. And, right there in the middle of the glue are bugs and bug eggs, larvae. GROSS. I can't handle that. This glue was super-duty. Meaning, these things had to have been there when they put this glue up. TOTALLY GROSS. And, then comes more vomiting. (If you're counting, that's twice that this house's grossness had pushed me to the point of vomitness.) After that, Pat demos by himself, while I do taxes - in another room, no where near the disgustingness that is our kitchen floor. After about 30 minutes, he comes to get me and says we need to make a decision and that I need to come and look the kitchen.

I walk out into the LR, and it smells. Smells like the musty, gross, unusable bathroom that was once part of this house; and we never used and immediately remodeled upon moving in. The whole house now smells like this, and there is no door to shut. Ughhhhh. So, there really isn't anything to do, except call our contractor and see when his guys can get out here to fix this mess. The floor is in ruins, partially demoed, soiled with black rotting-ness that is the original hardwood flooring. Ritchie says probably next week. So, we lay down a couple of rugs, plug in a smelly (but better than the mold) air-freshener, and resume our conversation from the last project about how much we hate the previous owners.

So, to recap:

The kitchen looks like shit.
The cabinets have been painted and hung, but look like shit.
The floor looks and smells like shit (literally).
We are using a really strong, really smelly air-freshener ... that smells like less like shit, but still shitty.
The rest of the house still looks like shit because we can't put anything away because ... see #1.

Here are the pics to prove it. (Hopefully next week goes better.)