Demolition Man(s - and Women, for that matter)

I took possession of my new townhouse on Thursday. On Friday, I had the locks re-keyed so I could be sure no one else had access to my new home. Today, the fun really started!

First, the plumbing repair that wasn't. The home inspector I'd hired told me that the wax seal under the upstairs toilet needed replacing. Fine, my boyfriend does all of his own plumbing, he volunteered to do it for me. Some intense pre-job obsessing later, he was ready to take it on. BUT........

The water shutoff for that toilet is missing a handle. Whoever had repaired that toilet in the past had use Vice-Grips to turn the water off, and had stripped the threads on the fitting. Surprise, surprise, the downstairs toilet's shutoff handle was missing, too. So was the handle on the townhouse's main water shutoff in the furnace room. WTF???????? I will be calling a plumber on Monday. Fortunately, my Dad's lady friend has the number of a good, reasonably-priced one, a fellow who worked construction jobs with dad in the past.

Next - the woman who had lived in the townhouse with her daughter for years was a slob!!!!! The amount of cleaning I will have to do is staggering, she obviously didn't believe that "dust" is also a verb. Not to mention burnt-out light bulbs not replaced, spiderwebs in the corners of rooms, venetian blinds harboring thriving ecosystems of dust mites, stained carpeting, and chipped, grubby walls and doors. She let her daughter paint pictures on the walls and doors of the child's bedroom, FFS!!!!!! Lord help me,. I have to paint over all of it.

Now, the people who occupied this place before Indifferent Single Mother Church Lady were 1) trailertrash, 2) cheap, and 3) obviously on crack. There is not a single "improvement" that has been professionally done - even the laminate was laid by total amateurs. We pulled down a plethora of screwed-to-the-walls pine shelves, a built-in pine corner desk, and at least a zillion wall anchor plugs. We're not done, either - the cheap plastic venetian blinds and their fittings, as well as the (oh, shades of the bad decor of the early 1990s!) balloon valences in both bedrooms, have to be removed. Ugh. It's a damned good thing that Polyfilla is cheap.

Wallpaper - don't get me started! There is really old, really cheap wallpaper and a wallpaper border halfway up the living room walls. My niece ran a scarifier over the wallpaper, then soaked it with a dilute remover solution - and proceeded to scrape off minuscule shreds of wallpaper. It looks like I'll have to rent a steamer to remove it. Niece, however, is a star at pulling wallpaper lath and trim off with a claw hammer. I don't think she realized she had this talent!

The kicker? In addition to the $700.00+ for the plumbing repairs, in addition to the expense and time for the wallpaper steamer, in addition to the necessity of painting the kitchen cabinet doors because they're too shabby for me to live with, there's the thoughtful gift that ISMCL left me in the loft/attic crawl space - a car battery with the top split!

Bloody hell.