Before & Bleak

Oh...

So, this is the classy way the stone base of my fireplace was finished in the living room. Notice the nail left embedded in the mortar:

And here's a corner of my dining room floor:

And this is my stair handrailing...really:

I'm looking at the house again, "for the first time." How will others see it. Oh, ick! I'm realizing again that my house is not well done. It's not an arts 'n' Crafts beauty like the rest of the neighborhood (which is great BTW).No, our old girl was built across the Bay from San Francisco during those frightening years immediately after the1906 quake, "Quick, get me outa San Francisco."

Then it was badly updated in the 1960’s by someone with no taste nor care about what they did. I mean, I won't even go into the scotch-taped electrical outlets we found, which we redid immediately. But we're still living with the most graceless, ugly river rock fireplace. (And I adore rock fireplaces, so that's saying a lot!) 

The lovely high curved ceilings were dropped and squared off with drywall and the knock down surface texture on the walls is so heavy-handed in places you can see how the beer party progressed as the guys worked. Many walls have double drywall. (I’ve yet to figure out why, since it would’ve been more effective and less costly to just blow insulation inside.) 

The double walls bury the lovely historic dimension of the trim so it loses the raised profile that catches light and casts small shadows- what creates trim's character. 

Whenever someone added something new, they just cut-off the end that was in the way. No need to realign anything. Oh, it's so sad how poorly things were done in places. The kindest thing a real estate agent could tell me about the house years ago was that it didn’t “tell any story.” 

It’s a total hodge-podge.