Seriously! As if I needed another reason!

We put up lots of shelves in the house, because shelves are useful. We also changed out all of the blah switchplates and used ones that we had from our previous house. Given that we liked our shelves and switchplates, it follows that we took them all down when it came time to move. Now, I’m pretty sure that it’s no secret that I had very little appreciation for the house.  As I was taking down the shelves and switchplates, I discovered that it was possible to have even less appreciation for the house.  I was trying to take down a switchplate . . .the screws had all been removed, but the switchplate wasn’t budging.  All of the other ones had come off without a hitch, so I was a bit puzzled.  I couldn’t get my nail between the switchplate and the wall to pry it off, so I poked the screwdriver into the screw hole to pop off the plate.  Image my shock, when part of the wall came with it!  ACK!  THAT wasn’t supposed to happen!  I was even more shocked when I looked that the piece of the wall and it looked like cardboard.  Yeah, that’s right, CARDBOARD!  Not what I expected a house to be made of.

I moved into the bathroom to take down some shelves.  Remember these?

The changing area, in all it's glory=)

You can’t really see it very well in the pic, but the shelves are on brackets that are attached to these mounting strip things.  So I took off the shelves and the brackets, and unscrewed the strips.  You’d think they’d fall off, but no, they were stuck to the wall.  You’d also think I’d remember my experience with the switchplate, but no, I didn’t.  I merrily pulled on the strip . . . . .ACK!  another piece of the wall!  This time, I was just pissed.  I’m not exactly sure why I was so mad about it, but mad I was!  Maybe I was mad because the walls seemed to be made of cardboard.  Or maybe it was because the day before we try to leave the house, it starts to really fall apart.  Or maybe it was that I’d put these very same shelves and switchplates up in other houses and had NO ISSUES taking them down.  In any case, I was just ticked.  I mean, seriously, AS IF I needed more fodder for my “I hate this house!” campaign!

So there were two mounting strip things.  This time, I learned, and when the strip wouldn’t come off, I got an exacto knife and cut around the strip to separate it from the wall.  Before doing this, I tried to gently pull on the strip . . . you could see the wall all around the strip flexing . . .not good!  So now  the strip was seeminly separated from the drywall, or so I thought.  See for yourself.

On the right, you can totally see how the strip left an indentation of sorts in the wall.  At first DH and I thought it was because of the semigloss paint being cheap quality.  We came to this conclusion because none of the shelves or switchplates on the economy flat paint gave us issues.  But then we decided that that didn’t make any sense.  The semigloss was high quality paint that had been bought when we moved into the house, and it was MUCH higher quality than the flat paint.  Sooo, our next and final thought was that the drywall was just cheap.  I mean, really, it looked like cardboard.  Need I say more? 

As if!