The very first week we owned our house, we farmed the kids out to relatives, lived in our little trailer in the driveway and painted the entire inside of the house (our possessions were still in storage from earlier as we looked for a house after selling our city house). In part two, I showed the before and after pictures from the main rooms and hallway, and today I'm showcasing the bedrooms.
I had had my share of encounters with wallpaper that needed to be removed in the past, and this house had two bedrooms with the entire wall surfaces covered in cutesy-country 1980s printed paper.
I wasn't looking forward to removing it, but as soon as we got the main rooms taped off and my husband started spraying, I tackled the bedroom walls.
And discovered that the paper was applied over bare drywall and before any of the moldings were attached.
Wallpaper sticks really well to bare drywall.
After many hours (actually, days) and lots of different techniques (solutions, tools, paste, etc.) I came to one conclusion:
I will never put wallpaper up in any house I live in for the rest of my life.
And I might even decide not to buy a house in the future based on if there's wallpaper on the walls (darn, does that count as two?).
As in the rest of the house, all the wood work was stained a walnut, and this room (my daughter's) had a chair rail molding as well.
Curiously, this room had a built-in cupboard which you can see in the far left of the picture (I know it looks just blown-out white, but it's actually a cupboard with open shelves above) that seems like it was salvaged from an old house and put in this one when they were building it in 1982.
It was the only wood thing in the house that was already painted white.
My daughter wanted a sky blue room and ceiling with clouds and a chandelier. We painted below the chair rail a pale yellow and last year she painted flowers along the bottom.
Even though it was built in 1982, apparently it wasn't far enough away from the 70s that we wouldn't find lovely plywood paneling somewhere in the house...
So we just painted over it.
I've left this white so far, but have just decided I would like to paint it a tan color. We'll probably do it when we get a new bed for him.
I like the large vintage school map I found on ebay, but my son's never been really keen on it, so it might stay or go when we paint. We'll see.
Remember what I said about the previous owner's decorating in Part Two? It's pretty evident here that the amount of frou-frou was too much...the less said here, the better.
This was my life for most of the week. What was going to be a day or two project between the two rooms turned into almost the whole week.
And of course we hadn't planned on texturing the walls, either, but felt they needed to match those in the rest of the house.
Joy.
This is where I put out a huge thank you to my family and friends who stopped by to help peel. Without them, this would've been my life for two weeks.
We painted the wood ceiling (you can just see the corner of it in the before and after pictures), and the portion below the chair rail creamy white and the main part of the wall a sage green.
I had sheers I liked from our old house that I adapted to fit here and bought new rods from Kmart. I made the roman shades from a green and cream ticking fabric.
We still want to pull up the nasty carpet and will probably use a plywood hardwood cut into wide planks and stained like our other floors.
I knew I wanted a chandelier in our bedroom even before we found the house and found this one at Lowe's on clearance because it had amber colored drops. I just replaced them with some plastic ones I found at the craft store.
Darn, now everyone who reads this will know they're not glass.
As part of our garage remodel (alluded to in Part One and will be the subject of Part Four) we had a french door installed in place of a window that matched the one on the left.
I kinda had this idea that I wanted the old part of the house to coordinate with the new and since we were using french doors in the new...
I also thought the window would match the one we removed from the dining room and we'd reuse them in the new office.
But I didn't measure.
Can you guess that they didn't match? (I swear they looked the same!)
So, while I think the door is nice, it was kind if expensive for "nice" and it is the one thing I wish I hadn't paid to have done.
But my husband really likes it, which helps a little.
This is the wall to the right of the bed. I wanted to show the easy way we simulated the look of panelling.
It actually turned out to be a good thing we didn't have texturing on the wall because the smoothness helps make it look like it could be wood when molding pieces were added.
We bought thin 1-inch lath pieces at the home center and attached them at regular intervals between the chair rail and baseboard.
The lath doesn't fit perfectly, but I caulked all the spaces and painted and it looks fine. To make it look perfect, we would've had to remove the chair rail and replace it with a 1 x 3 board (think craftsman style).
But I wasn't removing anything I didn't have to after all that wallpaper.
And caulk covers a multitude of sins.
-Jami
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