80's music dances out of the speakers. The music is young, confident, and brash. I used to be those things, a very long time ago. As the music plays, I work, letting the tunes drift in and out of my ears.
Very carefully, I scrape away the lime-green paint that was carefully applied to the walls in 1986. I know for a fact that these walls were last painted in '86, because that was the year the house was bought. The woman who bought this house, that year, painted all the interior walls with love and devotion. She loved this house. (Why she didn't paint it again remains a mystery. Why she let the lime green - which must've seemed so fresh and vibrant back then - fade away to a shadow remains a mystery.) As I chip away at the paint, I try and treat it with respect. After all, the former owner of this sprawling ranch house filled it with love. In the dining room, underneath the lime green is a layer of blue - light blue, the color of the sky. Most likely, that layer was added sometime in the 1970s. In the kitchen, however, under the lime green is wallpaper. By the goddess, the former owner painted over wallpaper. How am I going to get that off? What sort of damage will I do?
There's not much call for a person who paints the exterior of houses in the icy depths of February.
And so I've been hired to take care of the interior of this ranch house. The goal is to take away one layer at a time. Get down to the original. I've got photos of what the interior looked like, when the house was new. The goal is to refresh and revitalize. And possibly recover? We'll see - hopefully - what the original paint is like, now. And then the new owners will decide what to do with it. These new owners, by the way, could've just slapped on new paint, and they could've "modernized" the house. But, no. They want to respect the history of this place. They want to restore as much as they can. And all the new furnishings and appliances and whatnot will pay homage to the style of the house.
The house has history. One former owner wrote sci fi novels at the dining room table. She sold the house - and that table - to a medium, a psychic, who conducted seances here. In the 70's, a couple raised their kids here, and they also used the place as an artist's colony. I've been told that the bedrooms were painted all sorts of wild, vibrant colors - and the woman who used to live here had a hard time covering up those walls with new layers of paint. I haven't started working on those rooms yet.
I've got music playing, as I work. And I've got a thermos full of coffee. Paint chips fall around me. I will dig down, layer by layer.
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7 years, 10 months ago
14 Feb 2018 17:01 CET
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