Over past three weeks it has felt strange having all of these people in my house doing manual labor for me. I think I’ve missed sweating over my own grunt work a bit. Luckily, I now have this mess to deal with:
The last of the purple carpet!
As much as a loathe the purple carpet, I hadn’t yet ripped this last bit of it out because I didn’t really want to deal with what was under it. The carpet was hiding a very old baseboard that I can only assume is covered in lead paint, and nailed to the wall on top of the baseboard is a little strip of wood (studded with a bajillion carpet tacks). Probably because this wall is the original plaster and a bit wavy, someone picked a wood strip that was a little narrower than the width of the board below it. That’s going to make it very difficult to patch this sucker up and pretend that it’s one nice, tall baseboard.
I tried removing the little strip, but it in turn is covering up some crumbling plaster. This house has layers and layers of hidden WFT moments. Touch one thing and three more fall apart. So the little strip stays, and I lined it up as best I could with the face of the old baseboard and fixed it in place like that. Now I’m patching and skimcoating the entire thing so that I don’t have to sand lead paint. Finally I’ll add a little molding to the top, to cover any gaps between the little board and the wall.
It won’t look perfect but it is a 91 year-old house. And my mother has advised me to stop punching unnecessary holes in it. She’s probably right.
As I’m working on the baseboard I have so many other things to accomplish. The contractors have cleared out, and it’s now my job to paint the bedroom and all of its (unhung) trim before the carpet comes on Monday. Then the guys will come back for a few hours and hang the trim / adjust the closet doors.
Then it will be the time on Sprockets when we dance.