The real, awful truth of renos! In photo form.

Here are some before and afters. The thing with renos is that at first getting stuff out makes the place look SO much better. You could almost stop. But you don't. You keep taking stuff (read: walls, cabinets) out and boom, suddenly you think, "umm, now this looks worse. Much, much worse. And it's not liveable now. Oh Gawd help us!". On that note, this is what I saw when I got to the house last night after supper.

Here are some less scary photos. BTW, that IS J under there. I think the photo below shows perfectly the folly of DIYers. J measuring something in his work clothes, then J above looking like he just came out of a kill room from the show Dexter. Shudder.

Kitchen before flooring gone. And kitchen (below) after. Also a hole knocked in the chimney plaster which we want to expose for Only-God-Knows-Why.

The flooring shown close up to the right has never been stained. We're a little confused if this is or isn't the house's original hardwood. I think the stuff everywhere else is, but I found some old newspaper in coloured ink below a rotten board in the kitchen and it made me think it might be more recent than 1900. Fun to figure out the mysteries at least.

So most of the flooring came up without a hitch, meaning hours of pulling nails out, but no adhesives. See photo of me pulling a millionth nail here.

The stairs however, were a different story. The stairs had a lino and metal edging (yeah, a la industrial stairs) on them. The edging, no problem (meaning five f-words/minute). In fact, it probably helped preserve the gorgeous wood underneath.

The lino was and is another story. There is still adhesive in the form of black f'ing tar all over them. Sorry, you can't talk about tar on your beautiful, BEAUTIFUL wood without saying the f-word. You just can't.

At this point we're at a loss. We have tried chemicals, scraping, gouging, sanding. It remains. Oh, and if you're wondering, that is black paint on the risers of the stairs. Apparently the whole damn main floor and stairs were painted black. ??? Either someone was way ahead of their time for that new Victorian GothPunk home decor, or they were slightly insane. (shakes head).

 I think they actually painted the entryway but in a strange twist, before laying the stupid vinyl over it, actually tried to chemically strip the paint, which left the entryway wood in the worse state of all the floor we have uncovered. You can see it to the right below. It's so dry, I worry it might not even be salvageable. Not cool people, not cool.

Here's the best shot of that entryway "Rainbow Zig Zags, Looks Like My Winter Jacket from 1992" vinyl before below.