Not A Good April Fools' Joke or Decrepit Paper

When my wife, Miranda Kopfschmertzen, and I bought our house, we bought it knowing full well the previous owners were both tacky and lazy. By this I mean, were a home improvement project completed by Old Owner, the materials used would be bizarre or horrible and the job would be done with the poorest of quality (or both). As such, the house was a nice bargain for anyone willing to do some work and live with a certain hideousness until the work was done. Hopefully you are envisioning a living room with beer-stained, orange shag carpet and gold-veined mirrors. It’s not that bad, the mirrors aren’t gold-veined.

Most of the worst things have already been replaced. One thing that has yet to be reworked is the strange floor tiles downstairs. (3 different types of tiles that do not match each other. Lovely.) Odder still, in the entryway, Old Owner thought it necessary to use the faux-marble tile laid on the floor as a three inch baseboard around the walls (see Home Depot “how-to book” diagram).

A few weeks ago, a piece of this faux-marble baseboard simply popped off of its own accord. My wife, Miranda Kopfschmertzen, commented that if all the baseboards were applied so shoddily, it will be easy to take them off. Too true, however, a few day ago, another small section abandoned the wall suddenly and abruptly (see next Home Depot “how-to book” diagram).

My wife, Miranda Kopfschmertzen, bent down to pick up the fallen pieces and noticed something odd on the wall behind the tile (next Home Depot slide).

It turned out to be withered wallpaper. Now it is troubling that the baseboard application solution included gluing the tiles to the wallpaper rather than the wall itself and that this process was “acceptable.” What was deplorable was the wallpaper itself. That this wallpaper was once applied to my walls, that it was put up on purpose, that it was chosen from hundreds of other styles…this will forever haunt my soul (see wallpaper).

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