As I've mentioned in previous posts, we live in a hitherto-neglected Victorian house which is on the historic register. It is in a very nice part of town, and is the last historic house on our block waiting to be returned to its former glory (so, anything we do to restore or renovate it is easy money in the bank, since we bought our house for half the price of the value of all the houses surrounding it). There are so many things that this house needs done, it kind of boggles the mind, but luckily nearly all of them are things that my husband and I can do ourselves (and therefore build "sweat equity" in the house). We've already done a lot (like completely reconfigured the cellar and improved drainage patterns around the house to keep the cellar dry, and re-wired the cellar and entire first floor (we are now working on rewiring the second floor)). Not to mention removing several very large dead trees last year by ourselves (including digging the stumps out by ourselves). And an bunch of other stuff that I can't recall off the top of my head right now....basically, pretty much every weekend we work on the house.
One of the things we've been meaning to take care of since we bought the house a year and a half ago is the staircase leading to the servant's quarters in the house (the servant's quarters got renovated last summer, and now belong to my youngest daughter). Anyway, when we moved in, this staircase was covered in very old, very nasty, green indoor/outdoor carpeting (you know...the kind your grandma probably had on her back porch). Trying to remove it revealed that it not only had been nailed down with about 3 dozen nails per step, but had also been glued down with mastic. In fact, when we first bought the house it had nasty white berber on the second floor that the previous owners' cat had been peeing all over for five years...so before we even moved in we brought in hardwood flooring people to rip up that carpeting and refinish the floors underneath. When they ripped up the nasty white berber, they found not wood floors, but very old, very nasty, green indoor/outdoor carpeting that had been exuberantly nailed and glued with mastic to all the floors. A lot of prolonged cursing on the part of the flooring people ensued; we got our money's worth on that deal because the price was agreed upon before hand that they had to "remove all carpet" and refinish the floors. Getting the indoor/outdoor carpeting up without ruining the boards underneath was a nightmare for them (they had to bring in four extra guys to help).
However, it wasn't in the contract for them to do anything to the servant's staircase, so getting rid of the carpeting there was up to us. Some months ago I finally got the last of it up and found that the stairs were likely un-refinishable (despite the fact that they were dense 1/4 sawn pine) because the treads were split in several places and they had serious water stains down the center (it looked like water had been toted up and down those stairs for at least a couple of decades and had repeatedly slopped enough to permanently water damage the wood...the cellar still bears the remains of a privy, so the upper floor probably didn't get plumbing until the 1920's, so probably chamber pots and washing bowls were toted up and down those stairs for thirty years or so). I reluctantly ended up painting the stairs. But they are a nice color now, and certainly look a whole lot better than they did with the filthy carpeting.
In addition to the nasty carpeting problem, the staircase also had this wierd little doorway halfway up the stairs that no longer had a door in it. It had an 8 inch header, which meant my husband and I had to do the limbo every time we went down those stairs. In fact, I don't think anyone bigger than a kid could get down fully upright without smacking their head on that header. What the purpose of having a doorway halfway up a set of stairs is, we cannot fathom.
The doorway wasn't original, so last week I removed it. For some reason I get great satisfaction out of doing demolition of period-inappropriate architectural elements, so it was kind of fun. Underneath the door jack studs I found ancient wallpaper. It turned out it wasn't quite the original; there were two layers of wallpaper there. Unfortunately both were so brittle I couldn't salvage samples to put in my informal scrapbook-of-what-we-did-to-the-house. They were both dark brown, and the original ceiling was also dark brown. Considering the staircase was (and still is) completely unlit, it must have been quite the adventure navigating it way-back-when.
Now when it comes to taking down wallpaper, I'm an old pro. Many years back I saw (on some home improvement show) the tip to use a mixture of a few parts water to one part fabric softener to help loosen wallpaper. Being an experimentalist, I tried painting this mixture on relatively modern wallpaper that had been scored, simultaneously doing a patch that just used water, and another patch that used that fancy enzyme stuff that costs about $8 a bottle at the home improvement store. The fabric softener won hands-down...by far. Just be sure to rinse thoroughly afterwards (which you should do anyway to ensure that all the wallpaper paste is off the wall).
And, as I found out this morning, it also works like a charm on 100 year old wallpaper too. Just paint it on, leave it for five minutes, then scrape off the paper with a putty knife. Repeat if necessary (especially if there is more than one layer). Then, using the same mixture, scrub down with one of those rectangular green scrubby things you use on dishes. Then rinse thoroughly with clean water. Spackle the dents, prime, and you are ready to paint.
Now all we have to do is plaster work, priming, painting, and wiring on those stairs to finally get some lighting there. Oh yeah, we also need to go to the nearby architectural scrap warehouse and find a new bannister, because the old handrail was simply made out of left-over iron gas piping (dating to the same time they put in that stupid little doorway, since it was incorporated into the doorframe). The work never ends....
