THIS DIRTY OLD HOUSE
First Step: Cleaning
I had one month to make this house livable, and cleaning it from top to bottom was the biggest task. There were three things I learned about the previous owner that shed some light onto the condition of the home. She was an older woman, smoked inside and kept her dog chained up on the porch.
The porch reeked of urine, and the interior walls were stained with brown nicotine. It was clear there was a fire in the kitchen, because both the kitchen and dining room were covered in black soot. Plastic was taped over the windows in the living room and the bedrooms. The ceiling fan in the living room had at least an inch of dirt and dust sitting on the blades, and the floor was equally as filthy. The first bathroom had a haphazard patch on the floor, the once white toilet was brown with drips, and I don't even want to talk about the medicine cabinet. The second bathroom had nicotine drips on the walls, and the bathtub was chipping with beige paint.
With two buckets, two sponges and two rags, my boyfriend and I cleaned this entire house by hand. It took the whole month and yes, it was gross.
You can see in the photos below where we started to clean and how filthy the walls were. The worst part was washing the ceilings. The dirty water would drip on our faces. This was a labor of love.
I used Simple Green. It's an environmentally friendly, non-toxic, and biodegradable all-purpose cleaner.
Second Step: Patching
The next step was patching the drywall. There were several cracks in the walls where the house had moved and places where the drywall tape was peeling. The back bedroom had a series of shoddy patches, and the whole wall needed to be replaced. There were many spots where the drywall was bowing outward or inward due to a number of reasons, one of them being poor craftsmanship. These spots need to be disguised or cut out and replaced. With the help of my dad, I learned how to patch and replace drywall. He also taught me how to disguise trouble spots by floating drywall mud.
If I had all the money in the world, maybe I would have torn all the walls down to the studs. But I'm not wealthy, and I'm not looking to flip and make a quick buck. So these were quick, inexpensive fixes.
Third Step: Painting
Even after all of the cleaning, we still had to use oil-based stain blocker primer before we could paint. It took multiple coats before the nicotine stopped seeping through. I painted every room a crisp, true white and it made a huge difference.
If there's one takeaway folks, for the love of god don't smoke inside.