When you first enter our house you step into our foyer and to the right is the living room. While we had grown used to and fond of the wallpaper in these rooms, there were many places where the paper was ripped, missing, or had water damage. The ceiling paint was peeling off as well. Though we liked the depth, variation and history that the wallpaper provided with all of it's colors and layers, we decided it was a pretty important piece of the first impression of the house and would make the whole house feel more cared for.
In these first pictures you can get a sense of what it looked like before...from a distance it's hard to tell what all the different colors of the paper are but you can see the places where the paper is missing and you can even see some of the ceiling paint hanging down.
to begin, father David and mother Beth came to help strip the wallpaper. we mostly used a steamer and stripping chemicals in the harder to access areas.
Here is the foyer, prior to stripping-
in the living room you can see the table with stripped windows on it. those are from the small bedroom and the upstairs bedroom. we thought we would get those done too but instead we moved that project down to the basement and that is where it is now, so actually the small bedroom isn't quite complete....
note the paint chip taped onto the wallpaper-
This is where the old phone used to be. Underneath the wallpaper behind the phone box we found two more layers of older wallpaper!! Hard to see but it was very cool to get a glimpse of the history of the walls. The other wallpaper must have been stripped around the phone and then the new paper put up over it before reinstalling the phone.
The living room completely bare to the horse hair plaster!
Into the foyer-
up the stairs with the scrappers! we decided to keep the two kinds of wallpaper on the wall going up the stairs (on the left).
the wallpaper in the upstairs hall was mostly the same kind as the downstairs foyer and living room and had similar gaps so we went ahead and did that too.
viola!
after all the paper was off we began the painting process- first spackling and sanding with mother Eleanor- (note the color options on the walls. these were all colors that matched elements of the wallpaper.)
from the (storage room) dining room-
then we tackled the ceilings. we had to make a quick decision since we hadn't heard back from any of the contractors yet about blue boarding the ceilings like we had done in the small bedroom. so we decided to go for it and tim found a paint that's supposed to be tough and sticky so hopefully, after sanding and spackling, the paint would really stick and not start cracking for at least a few years.
all primed!
the final coat begins! here is the living room all cut in-
the color for the living room is "Indian River"
upstairs hallway-
time to put the lights back-
the hallways are painted in Bleeker Beige (as in Bleeker St, NY- not the nicest sounding name but we liked it)
all done and back to normal! the hallway seems a little lighter than before, the living room is a similar tone but feels much cleaner than before.
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