Mate Returns to Redone Home

There’s this rumor that men and women have very different approaches to remodeling their homes: men hate the upset, women don’t seem to mind. Therefore, I decided to remodel our home in Summerland when my husband, Jim, was out of town.

His work as an abalone/urchin diver is strenuous and when he is home he wants to relax. I could never find the right time to suggest we throw out the couch and tear the house apart. So when he and two of his buddies planned a 10-day surfing trip to Mexico, the seed of an idea was born: I would spare him all the chaos and headache of remodeling by doing it myself, with the help of my friends, while he was gone. I wouldn’t tell him about it, because he’d say no.

I felt this wasn’t entirely deceitful since we had already decided to recarpet the house. The main mess, I thought, would be the “cottage cheese” ceilings in the house. Our Summerland duplex had been built as a typical “spec” project, and these ceilings, along with the plaster walls, cabinetry and appurtenances such as plumbing fixtures, door handles, light fixtures, etc., reflected this. In other words they were cheap. This would be my chance--out they would go.

My husband would be gone 10 days. I would have the carpeting installed on Day 8, giving me a day or two to rearrange the house. From Day 1 to Day 8 I would do a blitz -- get rid of all the things that had gotten my goat for too long.

Since I decided to make this project a big surprise for Jim, I would have to do all of it without a lot of money. My loyal friend Hadda and I had endless phone conversations about the things we could do ourselves. We figured we could paint the dark kitchen cabinets a nice white, and we’d wallpaper the bathrooms to conceal inexpensive plasterboard walls. I’d have our dime-store light fixtures replaced with nicer ones (with the help of an electrician), and I’d replace the plumbing fixtures (with the help of a plumber).

I knew I would also need professional help for the ceilings. My friend, JoAnn, said her son, Scott, had some construction experience. I figured he could just nail up new ceilings on top of the cottage cheese. That’s how naive I was.

About four days before Jim’s departure for Mexico, I heard about a Wedgewood stove for sale--a 1950 model in excellent condition for $350. White enamel with shiny chrome handles and a stainless steel top and griddle.

It was the exact model of a stove I’d had in a beautiful little beach cottage I’d lived in for 11 years. Sentimental? Yes! I was thinking about this when JoAnn dropped by. We raced to the house where the stove was and I bought it on the spot, then realized I’d have to tear the kitchen apart to get it in.

The morning Jim left, Hadda arrived to paint the kitchen cabinets. From Gene at the Summerland Hardware Store (which was to become my College of Remodeling) I learned how to do the cabinet job: we sanded the dark doors lightly with 120 sandpaper, scrubbed them with a solution of TSP and put on a water-based paint.

Hadda was later to paint the cabinets in the two bathrooms this way. We were thrilled to see how much light the painting brought into our little home.

Early that first evening JoAnn showed up with Mark, a builder who had worked on her own home. Within a half hour he had completely demolished the kitchen cabinets that were in the way of the stove.

At this point I was hit with the horrible realization that maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Almost half the kitchen was on the floor, in pieces.

Mark had taken my predicament to heart and promised to help me with the ceilings. But he was busy for the next two days. In the meantime, he said, we should scrape off the cottage cheese so he could see where to do the nailing. After we made sure we weren’t dealing with asbestos, JoAnn’s son, Scott, agreed to do this unlovely job.

For the next few days it seemed we took more steps backward than forward. For one thing we were beginning to see that all the antique white paint--on cabinet doors, walls and sink counter--made the kitchen area seem sort of like a hospital. It was too blah-white.

As we studied this, Hadda said, “What about wallpaper?”

In half an hour I was at a local wallpaper store, going through book after book of samples. I had already ordered two different wallpapers for the two bathrooms--for the upstairs bath a masculine, dark green spotted print, and for the downstairs a feminine, country-flower print.

But no matter how long and hard I looked I couldn’t find the just-right print for the kitchen. On about Day 4 I found it: enormous but subtle calla lilies, pale white with pale green leaves on a rice-papery mauve-beige background. In washable viny. This was IT! The store ordered the paper to be sent Express Mail, overnight.

Meanwhile, I was wallpapering the bathrooms single-handedly after everyone else had long gone home. It was the pre-pasted kind and a snap to put up. I liked the quiet time, which literally flew by. It was 3 a.m. when I finished the downstairs country-flower bathroom and I wasn’t tired at all.

Scott arrived to scrape the cottage cheese off the ceilings--with a garden hoe. Minutes after he started I realized I might as well have set off an atomic bomb in the house. Great clouds of fine-powder dust billowed out the windows, covering vines and dusting the windows of cars parked on the hill. Inside, despite my covering books, furniture and tables with a number of tarps, everything in the house still turned white.

I vacuumed (with JoAnn’s industrial vacuum) all night long.

The next day Mark appeared with the tongue-and-groove pine lumber and with Fred. They set up their table saws on the outside lawn and began work on the master bedroom ceiling. After the first day they had the room almost done. It was exciting to see the magnificent difference a pine ceiling made!

A big clinker in the ceiling project was that I’d forgotten about sealing or staining the wood. It’s always easier to do this job before the wood is on the ceiling, over one’s head.

Into this dilemma stepped Denise. With a rag and rubber gloves that rotted out repeatedly, she stood on chairs and rubbed a limed oak whitewash into the ceiling. To go faster, she dipped a paint roller into the stain, held the roller so it wouldn’t move, and smeared it across the boards. We thought she was brilliant for thinking this up, even though the stain ran down her arms to her elbows.

With the ceilings now new and beautiful in the master bedroom, the walls looked grimy. Late one afternoon Melissa dropped by on her bike saying she was going to visit our neighbors.

“Oh, no, you’re not,” I told her. “You’re coming into my house!”

Melissa and I rollered antique white paint onto the walls of the master bedroom that night by the glare of shadeless lamps.

When Mark and Fred reviewed the room the next day they said something about “holidays” and I did the room all over again in the daylight.

The calla lily wallpaper arrived and of course it was extra wide and not pre-pasted. When Hadda and I began putting it up in the kitchen the paper seemed to take on a life of its own before we got it all on.

My friend Jeannie, visiting from San Francisco, dropped by and made herself useful beyond measure. The sink counter, white and blank, stuck out like a sore thumb. While we studied what to do about it, Jeannie suggested, “Sponge-paint it!”

“Sponge-paint?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“You take pieces of sponge, dip them into different colored paint, and blot them on the thing you’re painting,” she said. “It’s the rage.”

With acrylic paints I’d mixed up to match the colors in the calla lily paper--mauve, desert beige and the palest of greens--Hadda and I sponged away on the counter to our hearts’ content. The result was brilliant! We shrieked with delight.

The next day, while Mark and Fred were finishing the ceilings, the plumber and the electrician arrived. The plumber, Phil, got to work installing the new sink fixtures in the bathrooms and in the kitchen sink. Tony, a friend of Jim’s who does commercial wiring aboard fishing boats, installed new lighting in the kitchen and bathrooms.

The prime moment in all of this was when the vintage Wedgewood stove came in the house. When Phil had it hooked up we all cheered. The stove was the reason the entire kitchen had been torn apart--the centerpiece--and now we could see light at the end of the tunnel!

When the carpet layers arrived early Thursday morning we were ready for them. The old, beat-up beige carpet, saturated with paint, stain, dirt and cottage-cheese dust, went out of the house. It was replaced by beautiful silver-gray carpeting, wall to wall. Into the breakfast room and into each bathroom went an equally beautiful carpeting in dark but subtle “Neptune” green.

At the end of the day Denise and I sat and admired the absolute transformation--it was a miracle, almost too much to believe.

The next day Jim came home. On the drive up from Los Angeles he and his friends told me about their adventures in Mexico, which were wonderful. Then he asked me what had been going on at home.

I told him truthfully that words could not describe what had been going on.

When Jim saw what had taken place he was speechless. He loved it and he was furious too. After supervising the cutting-up of my credit cards he initiated the remodeling of the rest of the house: the tongue-and-groove pine went up on the high-pitched ceilings of the living room and upstairs bedroom, the entire house was painted inside, the yellow tile countertops in the kitchen were replaced with butcher block, and new cabinets were built where the old ones had been removed. We even bought new furniture.

Today, as we sit on our new sofas looking out at the sea, I have a feeling of miraculousness in the newness and beauty of our home. However, when I think back on that wild remodeling spree, I know the true miracle of that time was the fantastic love of a forgiving husband and of the friends who helped me.