Chronicles of the Living Room

Our experiences with the trailer have been adventurous to say the least. We have done renovations before, but not like this. The trailer was tolerable, but far from enjoyable. I don't mean to sound snobbish. I don't care if I do, really. The place was unhealthy and far from sanitary. Much of what we have done looks aesthetic but serves a greater purpose. This is what it looked like before.




The carpet was gross as we've mentioned before, but we had been hiding the evidence under as much furniture as possible. Uncovering it was unnerving and made me shudder once again. When we had moved in, we went over the carpet two or three times with a wet vac and shampoo. It left brown streaks still after all of that. The water was disgusting. No amount of cleaning would save the carpet, but we weren't sure when we'd be able to replace it. Well, the last of my student loan came in in April along with our tax return, so we figured we could finally take care of it. We found a good deal on laminate that was an exact match to the laminate in the kitchen at Rona during their paint sale.



This week we took the carpet and underlay to the dump in the van when we rushed in and out of Moose Jaw with our plumbing woes. It reeked like pee. I suppose that shouldn't surprise me when the previous people had pets in the house with their ten kids, and there was who-knows-what before them. Aslynn had thrown up on it days before we ripped it out, just confirming that we were doing the right thing. I'm sure glad we did. I think we'll be much healthier for it. Less Aslynn puke. I scraped out and bleached some mold once it was gone. I also found the remnants of the original blue shag on which the trailer was built. Literally. Scarily, the builder plopped the walls right down on top of the stuff. Anyway, it's taken care of. The laminate looks great and took less than six hours to install with a friend.

The walls were another story. This wallpaper was twice as difficult to remove. It took Faith and I nine hours, and we accidentally chipped off a ton of paint that was underneath it. Again, we found and removed some mold, then I filled and sanded the nicks, scratches, and chips out of the wall, and we painted. This took days on end, and the furniture was scattered throughout the house in every room. It was quite a process. The worst part was that the kitchen cabinets were all apart at the same time, but the kitchen is another story. You can look for yourself.





Notice all the dust in the air? Yeah, its drywall dust. It took a few days to settle while we painted, and then I was mudding and sanding in the kitchen. I had to wait for the paint to dry before I could tape the walls and turn the place into a space-aged bubble for spray painting. Why, you ask? For the t-bar ceiling of course. We straightened it all out and replaced all of the panels because there were only three out of forty-nine in the kitchen and living area without puncture damages. That doesn't include the ones that were stained and moldy. I also bleached and used Kilz on three sections of our ceiling where mold had grown. It was so fuzzy that when I removed the tiles below the patches, they left a greenish brown powder on the floor. Yuck. By the way, I burned and split my hands from using straight bleach. The gloves worked for a while, but not long enough. I also fixed all the sags in the ceiling by reattaching the old ceiling back to the ceiling joists. All in all, it was a painfully itchy ordeal. The only style of tile we could use were the fibreglass insulation type.