Moving into an older house has a whole new set of characteristics than a newer apartment/house. As I first looked around the large empty rooms when we looked at the place for the first time I saw the layers and layers of paint with some of it chipping off around the windows and thought, "Oh those will have to be stripped!". Then after deciding to move in and doing all the paperwork, we walked through the night before moving day and all the imperfections jumped out at me, almost becoming overwhelmed with the feeling of this being all wrong. Worried about the condition of the place and what family and friends would say or think when they saw it and knowing that I couldn't make it perfect within the next day I really started second guessing the whole decision between the few places we had narrowed our choices down to. Jason reassured me many times that everything would work out and once you get the furniture in you won't even notice it all. As things started moving in and the family came to see the place for the first time, the word "character" was used a lot... "the place has a lot of character" is what I was told many times.
Of course, my mind was spinning thinking of all the projects I was going to undertake to make this place our own. Many of those projects included stripping the old paint from all the woodwork since there were many many layers of paint. My first project was the bedroom since I finally found the bedding that I wanted. So this past weekend I started thinking a nice 3 day weekend would give me plenty of time to strip the woodwork and then repaint everything. It didn't take long to realize just how painful it is to strip paint, esp. that many layers. It took what felt like forever to strip a few layers off at a time. Needless to say, I only stripped the 2 windows in the bedroom and decided to do a fake fix on the baseboards, which was just sanding down some of the spots where someone tried to patch up and never bothered to sand.
As I stripped the paint off the windows, I thought it was fun to see all the different colors that it had been painted before and tried to think of what the room was used for or the history of the room. Of course when I got down to the light green, light blue and pale yellow colors, I thought of a baby's nursery. I think there was just about every color used on those windows.
After finally getting the stripping done with no other help, I had to really think about whether or not I want to do that again for the rest of the windows or woodwork in the house. If it were only one or two more windows... then maybe I wouldn't mind so much. But there would be another 12 windows to go and that wouldn't even include the doorways or baseboards. For now I'm thinking it may not all get done. For now, I'm just going to paint the kitchen walls and leave the rest of the apartment until I either forget about the painful process of stripping paint or I can find someone to help me with it. So for now, the "character" of the place is going to show through and we'll continue to just live our lives enjoying our new place and not living our lives to remodel our new place.
Hopefully in the next few days I'll have everything painted and back into its correct location and then I'll be able to take some photos and have a nice "after" photo of our bedroom.