Home Rehabilitation

Back in the mid 1980's my husband and I scraped up the down payment on a 100 year old fixer upper home, a generic three bedroom colonial. What we started with and what we did, can only be referred to as to as rape rehabilitation. Then house had been pretty much destroyed by some one's rather sick idea of style. They had pulled out chestnut woodwork and replaced it with Styrofoam woodwork. They removed French doors as well as the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room only our deity knows what they did with them. To their credit they had left the stained glass window in place at the bottom of the stairs, perhaps, thankfully, window replacement was beyond their budget.

They had wall coverings in place that would make your skin crawl. There were a total of four different wall coverings in the dining room, that old and should have been forgotten 'z-brick' in blue on one wall and one wall of 'z-brick' in green, some nasty fake wood paneling in pale green and a truly antique wall paper that was probably really as old as the house (about 100 years old), it was faded red with a repeating white floral centered print. The living room was comparably appointed, as was a sweet little heated front porch whose French doors were long gone.

The kitchen was where they truly outdid themselves with their bad taste. The floors were turquoise tiles and there were, lord help me, lovely matching turquoise tile counter tops of the self same tile. The stove and refrigerator were originally avocado green but painted over with harvest gold. Of course the harvest gold was chipping badly and the avocado peeking through which added to the, shall we call it, rustic charm. The woodwork had been painted dark brown and the light fixture was a wrought iron piece, a rather poor imitation of a medieval relic. I have left the best for last. The wallpaper in the kitchen was, where to start, it was large flowers in turquoise with avocado green leaves on rather funky looking dirt brown background. It looked like a psychedelic nightmare, it went far beyond any 1960s low budget LSD inspired movie.