Saturday, January 3, 2009

New Year's Labor of Love

My wife will tell you I am a workaholic. It's very difficult for me to sit still for more than 10 minutes. New Year's Day was particularly difficult. I have been obsessing about finishing our cedar fence and wanted to do some work on that. My wife thought that was insane so she put me to work scraping wallpaper....lots of it.


BEFORE

AFTER

Kim has been complaining about the circus tent colors she painted in there for the last several years. I am glad to see them go. This job would have been alot easier had she not painted it in the first place though. Its taking us about 4 times as long as we would like to get it done. It took me a 6 hours just to finish up that wall.

From a historical perspective its cool to see how nice and white the walls are under the paper. The plaster is in great shape. The paper itself was interesting too. The most recent variety was from the 50's. Then there are a couple layers of paper with plant motifs. The original layer (ca. 1910 - Arts & Crafts Era design) was made to look like cloth. I thought that was interesting.

The man who built our home had two children. His son served in World War One (The Great War for those of you old enough to remember). I imagine this was his bedroom. I believe this because the wallpaper I scraped in the other bedroom two years ago was much more feminine.

We have stripped every room in our home of wallpaper except for two. I must like scraping wallpaper way too much.

I will post a picture of the finished product when we are done.

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