Show Me What's Behind Wall #1...

We bought our house in May of 2004.  I know I felt pretty grown up, becoming a homeowner the day after my 24th birthday.  The house we bought was built in stages...it used to be a garage with an apartment on top.  This was built in 1935.  Then remodeling was done, the most recent in '71 and somewhere in there the downstairs was converted from a garage to a living room, kitchen, and bathroom.  In the early 80s, the dining room, laundry room, master bedroom, and the garage were added on.  Despite all these changes, they did a pretty good job of keeping the brick uniform on the outside of the house.

All of the upstairs, save the master bedroom, is still old, old, old 1935 old.  The rooms still sport the huge baseboards, the doors have the old-timey knobs, and underneath the carpeting in the original narrow hardwood flooring from 1935.  I *love* the old stuff!  My husband gave up trying to get me to modernize the upstairs and instead bought me a skeleton key so I could play with the doors.  :)

As you could imagine, a house that is 76 years old has some problems.  The people we bought the house from did a pretty stinking good job covering up a lot of these problems.  Due to lack of funding and motivation, we have just now (7 years after moving in) uncovered one of the nastier looking problems.  I am not at all surprised.  I knew something was strange when we moved in, but I went with the whole "ignorance is bliss" thing and the room was ok enough until we had some cash to fix it up some.

This is the guest room as photographed on June 6, 2004.  The rooms have cement walls, and in this particular room one wall was half wallpaper/half paneling. Hmmmmm, why would they put paneling up in a room of cement walls???  That was something I thought was weird, but never wanted to think too hard about it.  If you can see the larger view of the picture, you can see the have patched cracks in the bottom board on the window and the baseboard with putty.  Stay classy, East Texas.

Moving on to June 12, 2011...I have paint, cement wall repair junk, and lots of time on my hands this summer.  So yesterday I ripped the paneling off the wall to see what it was hiding.  There was an obvious problem before removing an inch of paneling, because the panels under the window had peeled up and fallen off in layers.  There was just a thin layer of wood remaining.  This is what I found when I yanked the clever cover-up job off the wall:

Scary, no?  It might be hard to tell, but that would be a chunk of moldy sheetrock they tacked up on the wall.  Why is it moldy?  Because that window is leaking!  Which should have been obvious by the patch job on the window trim.  Why is the window leaking?  Because of the obvious termite damage the previous owners dealt with covered up.  Isn't it funny how that passed the termite inspection?  Must be because the putty wasn't cracking yet and they had a treadmill in front of that window.

The good news?  The termite damage is obviously old.  My husband fixed the window and it hopefully will not leak any further.  The wall will be restored to its original cement glory (once we figure out the best way to do that).  No more grandma wallpaper and border. Hooray!