There was horrible wallpaper in each room and the floors weren't in the best of shape either.
Dad suggested that Lynda and I should invite our friends over for a wallpaper removing party!
I invited my best friend Penny Boyd, and Lynda invited her best friend Patsy Baird.
This was going to be fun! (Keep in mind that we're still 10 and 14.)
We had all the equipment we would need, buckets with warm water, sponges and scrapers.
Since Lynda was 4 years older than me, she decided that her and Patsy would do one room and Penny and I would do another room.
Dad thought it was a good idea that we be separated too, so there would be no fighting and we'd get lots of work done.
Dad showed us how to soak the paper with the wet sponge in a section, wait for a few minutes, soak another section, wait a few minutes and then go back to the first section and start scraping. Easy!
Since Dad had showed us in the room Penny and I were working on, we got a head start and let those other girls know it by taunting them "we're going to finish first, we're going to finish first". A loud "Shut up" came out of the other room and Dad told them not to say Shut up, it wasn't nice......and everyone should get back to work.
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| No fancy chemicals or scrapers back then! |
We kept at it and scraped and scraped and finally got a small portion that was down to the bare walls! This was going to take forever!!!
After a few hours of this it was time for lunch. After lunch, Penny and Patsy announced that they really wanted to stay, but they had to go home. Lynda and I looked at each other and then looked at Dad and he said "it's okay girls, I'll help you with the walls." He had been in yet another room and had made a lot more progress than we had.
By the end of the weekend, all the walls were bare and ready for whatever decorating was coming up. We prayed that it would not be more wallpaper!
I must tell you now, that before the war, my Dad had been an artist....a painter.......and you know artistic types can have some odd ways of thinking (no offence but it's true).
Dad decided that tiling the floor with linoleum tiles, would be the easiest, quickest and nicest way to go and he could just glue them right over the awful sheet linoleum that was on the existing floors. They would be easy to keep clean too.
When he was finished, they looked amazing!
After he was done with the floors, he had to decide what to do with the walls. The artistic part of his brain told took over and he came up with an idea. He decided to put the same linoleum tiles on each and every wall, from floor to ceiling in every room except the kitchen and bathroom!! What???? My Mom was mortified at the thought of it, but there was just no stopping Dad when he got these ideas in his head.
It took him a few weekends of working all day Saturdays and Sundays but he finished and there it was, just like he had said, floor to ceiling in each and every room. You couldn't tell the floors from the walls! But you know what? It was easy to clean just as he had said, and since he did most of the cleaning (remember I told you about Mom not being well).....he would get out the mop and go from floor to wall with one swipe! He was so proud of what he'd done.
Mom, Lynda and I were embarrassed at first but after awhile, when you got used to it, it really wasn't that bad and when our friends came over they simply said "I see you've been climbing the walls again!"
One thing I'm grateful for is that those walls and floors stayed exactly the same for all the years we lived there. God Bless whoever bought the house after us and had to remove those tiles from the walls!
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| Miniature Rose painted by my Dad....maybe 80 yrs. ago |
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