As previously mentioned, our apartment in Guelph was a weird place in which to live. When we moved in, the kitchen was painted in police blue, fire truck red and school bus yellow. It was an offense to decorating and to the senses. Painting it in fairly neutral colours was our first order of business.
It was a second floor apartment but the stair was internal. The stairway and hall were painted in Flintstone Vitamin Purple. The colour of vitamin (or candy) that is not really grape but sort of a dusty purplish flavour. Some kinds of off-brand Kool-Aid have this flavour as well We primed the upstairs hallway but never got around to more than that despite living there for over a year. The ceiling of that hallway had been replaced shortly before we moved in and was just taped drywall. No paint or primer or anything. The light switch was an old-fashioned push-button model that I’m pretty sure hasn’t been ULC certified since the 1920’s.
The bedroom that we called ours was fairly tolerable except that at some point, a previous tenant had painted the whole thing (bar the carpet) white. Ceiling, trim and walls were all the same semi-gloss institutional white paint. They had clearly painted over wall paper because it was peeling off one wall but being sort of held in place by having also been painted to the ceiling.
The spare bedroom that we used as an office was painted baby blue and had a Spider-man themed border running around it about a metre off the floor. We tried to peel it off but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a real wallpaper boarder but more of a long-strip sticker sort of thing. It didn’t come off neatly at all so we left it there and referred to it as the Spider-man room. Just off of this room was a second bathroom consisting of a toilet (that worked) and a tub/shower (that our landlady was pretty sure didn’t drain to anywhere. Well, it must have drained to somewhere but she didn’t think there was a pipe connected to the somewhere so she asked us not to use it) and that was it. It was painted dark navy with white splatters.
The previous tenant had owned at least one cat, had smoked and had never really cleaned the place at all. Amy’s mom came up to help us clean things out initially and was pretty thoroughly disgusted by the whole thing. In order to get rid of the stench of smoke and cat, Amy pulled all the cat hair out of the radiators and we gave the walls a good washing. Turns out the living room/dining room had cream walls and not tan as we thought when we toured it.