The walls are full of holes...

I told the story of the crappy tenants here and we are hard at work renovating the cottage. But: as with everything else about my house, scratch the surface and you probably won't like what you find. The room that used to be the kitchen was no exception. The plaster was lumpy and rotten and we decided to remove it, along with the old tiles, only to discover that the building cement was inferior, old and crumbling because the room was probably built in the 1930s. In one corner, quite a few of the bricks simply came apart and in other places, there are just holes between the bricks.

Oops. The builder says we can get away with not rebuilding the wall except for the part where the bricks came right out, he will add the plaster to the gaps. We also took out some bits of newspaper stuffed into the gaps and it was a section from the employment section of the classified advertisements that dated back to 1982.

I was amused to see what salary offers looked like in the early 1980s. Around twenty times less what they are today for similar positions. It's very likely that people's salaries also went a whole lot further than they do today. Sigh...

First posted here on my blog in WeKu