House Repair: spackle, paint prep, electrical outlets, ... a start

broad water view

The holidays always brings a sweep of effort put into nagging small projects throughout the house. Just before Thanksgiving the race began to complete a rash of projects to cure shortcomings that make life difficult in this old house. The list of cloying inconveniences in this house is as long as Interstate 95, or better yet I 80 to the west coast. You get the picture....its overwhelming. I am convinced I will be buried in the ground before this place is livable on a 20th century level.

I am a child of the 20th century, and a thankful one at that. I want all of the comfort making inventions of that century, and the newer ones of the 21st century.  I embrace them all. Somebody will have to pull the computer from my cold dead hands before I am set in the ground...I am completely unwilling to walk backwards in time to inhabit this house at a 19th century level. Charming sure. Just try to live it. Unfortunately, this house demands that regression from all tenants.  One must leave modernity behind and walk on the wild side...back to rural agrarian America. You get the good with the bad living in this house, fine stirring broad-water views married to below standard living accommodations.  Enough complaints and explanation, back to the recent projects.

more spackle patching, it never ends!

First off, we have been tortured by the lack of an electric outlet in the bathroom. It is so inconvenient to have no power in the bathroom, other than the overhead light. Drying and styling hair is impossible!  Shaving with an electric razor...impossible. Using an electric toothbrush, or curling iron, not possible! You can't do that here. Basically you can't do much personal grooming without an electrical outlet in or near the bathroom. Cleaning is also difficult. One cannot vacuum out the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of a bathing area without access to an electrical outlet. I figure the bathroom in this house was installed sometime around 1950 or 1960. For the first one hundred years of its life, a lack of electricity in the bathroom wasn't really a problem. From the 1960's until 2007 when we purchased the house the previous tenants had lived in this house more than forty years without a bathroom outlet.(and that is the least of it!) I was out of my mind over it for the last four years. Mr kindly solved that problem the week of Thanksgiving. He took on the bathroom and snaked some wire in to the walls to install an outlet next to the sink. Bless him! He also installed an outlet in the molding along the floor in the hallway so that the floors can be vacuumed. Sweeping uneven floors with a broom just doesn't get them clean. That outlet will improve house maintenance immensely. Its life changing!

spackle on the dining room walls

more cracks, more spackle

What else has been happening? Spackle. Spackle is finally covering some of the cracks in the walls. My wish is for lots of Spackle, to cover the multitude of cracks in the wall surfaces.  This time it's the dining room, but that's only the beginning of the spackle treadmill here. We could easily empty two or three five gallon buckets of this stuff, and still not have all the cracks in in the interior walls filled! Maybe I exaggerate a bit, but it is painful to live with cracks, tear and holes in the walls. I long for a home as normal and beautiful as my last one. We work and work and work, and progress is tortuously slow. Normalcy doesn't seem to be a possibility here, that will not come for several more years. I am not sure I will survive it,nor live to enjoy the place when it is done.  Emotionally and physically it is a roller coaster ride, I am not sure I am up to completing. Every day I fight the urge to run away and not look back. The jury is still out on this drama. Will it all be worth it? I am not convinced that it will be. The punch list is still being worked on daily. Next posting more kitchen improvements......................