The Day My Windows Were White Again

Instead of a post about new fallen snow, this is actually about my latest (in a series of many) crazy home improvement projects.  I want to start by saying that I love our house.  When we bought it, the market here was CRAZY - everything sold fast that it was tough to find a house because they where gone the minute the sign when in the yard... in some cases, before the sign went in the yard.  So, for our house hunting trip, we had 48 hours to look, decide and make an offer - then it was back to Utah because Kyle was leaving for several weeks on a trip to China.  That weekend there were three houses for us to consider... the one we bought which was out of our price range, but I loved it, the runner-up which was in our price range and had a three car garage both of which Kyle loved and the "safety" house (second runner-up) which neither of us loved but we figured it would be better than being homeless if the other two were already gone.

Kyle of course sacrificed his three car garage and we got the house I loved.  It was perfect!  Except for a few "weird" things that the previous owner left behind... most of which we didn't notice until after we moved in that summer.  Problem #1 - pink paint throughout the house.  Ok, so we obviously noticed that one, but I didn't mind.  It gave me a giant project to tackle and I loved painting the entire house just the way we wanted it. 

Problem #2 - they had a dog that was very sick and old.   The carpet looked immaculate and was a nice neutral color, so we thought the flooring would be fine.  But when we cleaned the carpets (just to be safe), and the hot water hit the carpet and padding, the smell of dog urine permeated the entire house and it didn't go away.  Even though there weren't any stains, the pad revealed the awful secret.  It was bad enough that we had to replace the all of the carpet.  Financially I wasn't thrilled but it was so fun to get soft, CLEAN, pet-free carpet to go with our new paint. 

Problem #3 - the  previous owners did a lot of deep-frying.  I was able to get the layers of grease off of everything in the kitchen, but soon discovered some strange discoloration on the blinds in the living room and by the front door.  I cleaned them, I bleached them, my mom cleaned them and I cleaned them again.   But the yellowy-brownish stains stayed.  As long as the blinds were open, you couldn't see it and from the inside it never showed.  But from the outside it looked awful when they were closed.  Those windows face south and get very direct sun exposure.  Heat wise, we love it - but I think it actually deep fried the blinds.  I was able to clean the grease off of the side that doesn't face the sun, but on the other side we had "blind brûlée."  So after doing some research and talking to my paint buddy at Home Depot, I decided to paint them.  Thanks to a special primer by Glidden called "Gripper" they are white again.    

I am sure no one else ever noticed, in fact if you just glanced at them, it looked like shadows.  And the fact that I would bolt out of bed every morning and run downstairs to open them up, prevented anyone but me from ever seeing it.  But now I can pull in the driveway and if the blinds are still closed I won't have a heart attack.  I noticed and it drove me crazy... unfortunately, I didn't have far to go.