Stairway to...heaven? NOT!

I hope everyone had a safe and happy New Year celebration!

Up the stairs...

I thought I would start the new year off with the part of my house that is NEW to you...the second level of the hut...

This charming and and..uhhh...vintage... room...is the Master Bedroom..this is what it looked like the day I got the house....the water damage was extensive..BUT!  to my utter glee...that rain had literally washed off a lot of the BLUE PAPER! YAAAAY!  We all....from previous rants....know exactly how Lisa feels about all of the blue paper in this house...stuck on with something akin to hide glue...that scrapes off..but only scrapes off in little, bitty pieces....but then becomes attached to whatever it falls on...including your hair....and the bottom of your shoe...and you find it in everything...even your soup...and you find it days later too....even when you double checked to make sure you got it all...even when you went over the walls and the floor with Super Clean and a scraper... again......it was worse...and you all  know that this was a very traumatic experience for me...it was worse than picking white paint....that BLUE PAPER almost cost me hundreds of dollars in therapy...

Door from Master bedroom into 2nd bedroom

And this? is the other bedroom...I know...it looks like something out of a Scary Potter Movie....and it was...along with the bedding, clothes, garbage and other debris? There were six...yep...six....full to the top...overflowing...petrified...duh...duh...DUM!   Cat boxes...

of all the things I cleaned in this house, these rooms made me the most sad...their were children in here...with all that filth...their toys and clothes and crayons were everywhere...anyways...the beds up here were so soaked with urine and cat feces we dressed in plastic rain gear to get them down the stairs...

I can soooo hear the collective...EWWWWWW! Coming from all of you...hee hee!

I put this pic in here so you could see how dark it was up there

old linoleum

and how light it was after curtain removal

yes, those are cat turds...

light...aaaah....

This second bedroom...was my treasure room for a long time...I spent an entire weekend reading the walls in this room...underneath all the wall paper...perfectly preserved... were hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles from 1919...they were incredible and lot's of them were in Finnish and Norwegian...there were also 1950's newspapers under the linoleum....now, I hear a lot of expressions relating to the "good ole days"...well, I don't think the papers today? can come close to the grisly, murderous, daily goings on of the year 1919 in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan... from what I could tell...people were beating the tar outta each other, their wives, children and neighbors...daily! but the agricultural news held vast information about what a large farming community this was and after reading for awhile... I completely understand where Michigan's right to farm laws came from and why they are so perfectly preserved and stringent today! and I am so very pleased that they are! 

After yanking down the curtains and washing the walls and floors of these rooms, we installed a bed in the treasure room...the weekend we were supposed to "camp" here...(and I refused to leave, a bed...a toilet? what else do you need? lol!) there was so much light as the Master bedroom window faces East and the little bedroom window faces West...the morning sun streams thru both rooms and then again in the afternoon, it is all lit up...It is one of my most favorite features of this house! It was built to capture every spec of available light from every direction...well, as long as you don't have a kook covering up every inch of glass with sheets, towels and ugly curtains! oh...and dirt...you should prolly wash the grime off too...;)

One day I was rearranging treasures and I started seriously looking around at these two rooms...hmmmm....they would make an incredible Master Suite with a little rearranging...and since I do not plan on moving for a very long time...and there is only the two of us...why not make one large room? and the closets? wow...they ran the entire length of the house with little, tiny doors to access them...the one at the top of the stairs was the worst! you had to bend over at the top of the stairs to actually get in the room...my Honey is 6ft 4inches tall...a chiropractor would seriously be in his future...the closets were lined with mildewed cardboard that kept the blown in insulation in tact...they were nasty! and I was NOT sticking anything I owned in them anyways! 

Top of the stairs where the closet used to be...

I went and got a hammer and crow bar and started prying the boards off...I finally got  all the boards off...ripped off that nasty cardboard and stuffed every inch of that insulation down into the living room wall with a broom...called my Muffin and asked him to pick up a large roll of insulation and re insulated the wall...I cleaned out 9 bees nests and 50,000 spiders...next came the wall at the top of the stairs that separated the staircase from the little bedroom...

This is how many nails were in those boards...

the only place I couldn't reach that danged paper! I did end up screwing a 2x4 to the wall in the stairway and laying  a plank from the floor to the 2x4 to use as scaffolding...my Honey was not happy about my doing this..he was convinced that I would succumb to death... by stairwell....but hey! not everyone has the advantage of having legs as long as a giraffe! AND I got ALL the paper! When this wall came down the light down the stairs and into the kitchen was amazing!

This looks alot like my upstairs!

There were quite a few treasures amassed from up here...the closets were stuffed full of hunting gear, old dishes, antique snow shoes...a tiger eye maple dresser with the mirror and the keys to the drawers!

When I get to paint the upstairs I am going to paint it the same color as the kitchen and living room...my dilemma is this: What do I do with the stairs? I tried to get the paint off but wow...it is so thick and stuck in the grain...I am afraid I will have to sand off half the tread to get it off...soooooo...

What do you think of these?

I just loved the painted stair runners...my sweet school teacher friend has thousands of stencils I could use...and the paint would tie my kitchen in with the stairs...Any suggestions?