Wallpaper. Yes, Again.
I finally finished the guest room wallpaper project.
First, let me take you back to where we started.
She was a room with ruined wallpaper and carpets. It was my favorite room in the house, though.
As you can probably tell, it looked ROUGH. I loved the existing wallpaper here, but there was no way to undo the damage that had been done here before. I consulted my smartest elder preservation minds and they told me it couldn’t be done. We had the house rewired, so there ended up being holes punched into the plaster walls anyway.
The carpets weren’t installed properly, so I was lucky enough to just roll it up and throw it out. It was very dirty. Underneath were these GORGEOUS painted, original wide plank Douglas Fir floors. I LOVED them. There was only really one imperfection, and it was just that the words “Barnes” was transposed on them backwards in Sharpie, my guess is from the carpet.
After that, I patched some of the baseboards, and the plasterers came back through, and the painters came in and primed. Unfortunately, the painters thought we were going to redo the floors on the upper level, so they didn’t cover them and primer got onto the floors. Eye twitch. I do believe this is because contractors of most types are not used to people in San Francisco wanting to save what’s already there. We are, unfortunately for houses like mine, a “blank slate” kind of place, where everything needs to be redone every few years. I am aware that we may seem like psychopaths to most.
The room (and floors) was primed, the ceiling and trim painted... now to pick a wallpaper. This room was probably the hardest for me to settle on. I think I ordered 30 or more samples. It took me almost 2 years to finally move forward with a pattern and I’m just so in love with how it turned out! Once I set my mind to it and ordered my trusty Zinnser glue and paper, I got this room’s walls done in 48 hours.
The big lesson I learned in this room - if you are papering over existing wallpaper, use a lining paper. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THIS. I used a lining paper in my dining room to cover some unevenness in there due to 3/4 walls being paneling. You can’t really tell since the paper is a busy pattern, but if you look REALLY closely, you can see lines from the older wallpaper, which is annoying after all the money and effort I used in this room.
Overall, I am so happy with the way this guest room wallpaper project turned out. I’ve still got to address the floors, fix the bed frame further (I got an antique Jenny Lind frame for $1!!!), find a rug and some more furniture that fits in this small Victorian bedroom with the world’s smallest closet.. but it’s at least no longer a white insane asylum room.
Still very much a work in progress, but much better than it’s been in probably 30 or so years.
