Daily Prompt: Varnish

This is a short but not sweet tale of a huge mistake made by me in the seventies, and yes, I was a mother with three children and a semi responsible adult.

We moved into a home in 1971 that had a furnished basement. The previous owners had used leftover tiles from whatever or wherever and tiled the entire floor and hallway. The two bedrooms were shag carpeted and the big laundry and storage room was cement.

The walls were painted a coffee-with-some-cream color in the entire house. It was a nightmare. The big basement was a great play area for the kids and our littlest one carried her tricycle down the stairs to ride. The larger room was paneled, popular in those days. The panels didn’t all match and there were large rectangular vertical fluorescent light fixtures hung on the walls. Sounds like a beauty so far….😂 We often held parties for our neighbors and one time I decided to wash down the varnished wood paneling. To my surprise, they turned gray and ugly. It turns out the brown paneling wasn’t wood after all, just a cheap imitation.As time went on in our “new” home we found many items had been shoddily “fixed” by the previous owner and even some illegal repairs. Surprising since the previous owner was a lawyer, or maybe not?🙄

We had lots of experiences as our three kids grew up in that home, in the twenty-two years we lived there. More stories on those adventures to come.

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