Jesus Thong Room

Before we owned our Calvin house the back bedroom belonged to the teenage son of a single mom. They didn't have a lot of money, so he used what resources he could scrape up when it came to decorating his room: posters and magazine pages of his favorite role models. Well, and just plain old models.

Oh, and a random image of the Cross.

When our friends the Ficks saw the photos of his room, Jess dubbed it the Jesus Thong Room. (And no, I don't mean the thong you'd wear on your foot.) On one side you have the Cross hanging serenely between the basketball mega-stars of the day, showing off their rippling muscles as they drive the ball in for a slam dunk. On the other side you have... THONG TIME! And boob time. Thigh time. Basically, hot chicks.

Who would have thought that one could combine the two into the same space? Well, I guess you could, but who would want to? This teenage boy, I guess.

Since then JB and I have altered the room a little. Jesus is still welcome in the room (though he doesn't appear on any wall) but we had to let the thong ladies go. This house only has room for one hot chick, and I already got that job.

Notice the improvements we have made. Particularly the floor. And the nice clean doorknob. When these people painted their rooms they did not use drop cloths. And they didn't bother to try to wipe up any messes, either. Unfortunately, their painting indiscretions on the windows are not viewable, but they basically painted all over the panes of glass and never scraped them. They also never cleaned the windows, so you couldn't really see out of them. I cut them some slack on the house's condition because they were poor, but these little things I just listed can be done for FREE. And the whole house was like this. Agh!

The room has morphed into guest room and now baby/kid's room, but I'll always remember it as the Jesus Thong Room.

Calvin Hallway beautification

When I was scanning my old blog for my Funky Loser story, I noticed another old post with a photo of our hallway before we fixed it totally. I never posted an updated photo and cousin Sarah's house progress photos inspired me to finally show the finished product of some of our toils (Sarah, I'm looking forward to more of your photos!). Also, JB has been working his butt off on windows, and he sometimes forgets how far we've already come. It's hard to appreciate your work unless you see a good Before and After.

Here is the hallway before we bought the house and the correlating improvement. Not only did we paint, etc., but we cleaned the window. Apparently the previous homeowners did not own Windex, as NONE of the windows were cleaned. They were FILTHY. I found proof that the storms had not been washed since before 1972!! This window was one of the cleanest ones, though if you look closely, you will see paint all around the edge of it, because scraping paint was too much work for them.:






















Here is the other end of the hall. We had refinished the floors, painted the walls and ceiling, and rewired the light by then, but the trim still needed help:























Now, sure, it looks good. But the casual eye will not understand the insane work that went into this, unless you've owned your own vintage fixer upper. Such as listening to previous owner's whispers in the air as you work:

"Hmm...this door really needs to be painted. But sanding, washing, priming, and REMOVING THE HARDWARE is too much work. Let's just slop paint everywhere and call it good. Let's not even bother to TRY to remove some of the mis-slopped paint. Oh, and washing the door when it gets dirty? Who do you think I am? A CLEAN person?"
























JB spent hours cleaning all the hinges on all the doors. We trashed the cheap knobs (I believe that the originals were pawned) and scored vintage replacement knobs off of eBay. I heart eBay.























This is an example of how we spend our free time. Yes, we are crazy. JB has a load of more projects like this lined up, so if we don't post for a while, you'll understand. We're busy out buying more Windex.