Staring at the Walls

I'm literally staring at the walls, and I'm confused by what I see.

This is a close-up of the painted fabric wall in my room. As I said earlier, this type of wall covering appears in a few places around the house. I assume that it's original, meaning it dates back to 1893. If not, then it's probably from the big remodel the Hart family did in the 1930's. Either way, it's a lot older than me.

It's a bit hard to see in this photo, but there's a discolored area in the middle of this part of the fabric wall covering. It's rectangular and runs left to right. Some of the cracks in the paint roughly follow the borders of the discolored area.

My hunch is that there used to be a shelf mounted to the wall here, and over the years, the sun bleached the paint around it, leaving this rectangular section a slightly different color. The screws, nails, bolts, or whatever hardware held the shelf to the wall may have also cracked the paint as it got old, leaving a kind of border marking its presence.

There's also some handwriting on the surface; I assume they're measurements. Clearly, you wouldn't have scribbled on a finished wall, so the writing must have come much later, after someone decided to cover up this surface. (Possibly the same time that the drywall went in, if not the same person.) Just for fun, I tried measuring walls, doors, and bits of trim hoping to find something that measured 34 inches, 33¼ inches, or 53½ inches. No luck. So what were they measuring and where are those pieces now?

The Woman on the Stairs

Kathy's getting into demolition mode. While I was off doing something typically pointless, she decided it was time to remove the old carpet from the second-floor stairs.

(If the stairs connect the second and third floors, is it a second-floor staircase or a third-floor staircase? Two and a half?)

These stairs have had a red "carpet runner" on them since well before we moved in; probably since the 1970's. It's not a real carpet runner, it's just leftover red carpet that someone installed on the stairs. They did a good job -- it's held up this long -- but it's not what we want. Unlike the rest of the red carpet on the second floor, it's not all food-stained. Evidently they never had to carry plates of lasagna up to guests on the third floor.

Anyway, we've always planned to replace the old red carpet with a proper carpet runner. We just never... you know... got around to it. But the first step in any new project is the demolition. No demo, no progress. Grab the hammer!

Kathy pried up all the tack strips underneath the carpet, with only minimal loss of blood. (Three Band-Aids, I think.) She tore apart the pieces of carpet, which had been all taped/glued together. And she meticulously yanked out all the tiny little nails that had been holding everything in place. In the end, we got a set of nice, smooth, painted stairs.

It's actually a bit disorienting to walk downstairs now. We got so used to the dark red color that it looks funny when it's brown. And not fuzzy. I think we both stumbled a little bit for the first few days as we readjusted to the new look of the stairs. Something in the back of our brains said, Stop!, and made us do a little stutter-step at the first step. We're over it now, but it means we'll probably have to relearn how to walk on the stairs yet again when we put down the carpet runner.