Worst Blogger Ever.

We were recently visiting my husband's family in Michigan and my mother-in-law, the famous J featured in many posts about yardwork, told me that she looks at my house blog each day hoping for an update.  This is a lot of pressure.  I haven't really been doing much at home, so not only do I have to dig up a project and really get into it, I have to write about it in an entertaining manner.  

Here's some old work that I haven't posted yet, I can't guarantee it will entertain, but I'm glad it's finished:

We finally summoned the energy to finish scraping the cellulose paste off the walls in the living room.  This is what the bare plaster looked like:

The walls are in really terrific shape, there's one fairly large crack that I had planned to fix but decided that it doesn't bother me.  It looks like the woodwork was shellac'd after it was installed and then the plaster was never actually painted.  

We pulled a couple of tiny scraps of different wallpapers off with the burlap, so we have an idea of what the paper looked like at different times.  I would love to keep with the history of the house and install a paper at some point, but that will have to wait.

The mulling over of the color choice continued until I bought a couple of gallons of this hideous color called Connected Gray.  You should have seen the faces of my colleagues when I told them that I painted the largest room in my house Connected Gray.  I knew from the first pass with the roller that it was perfect.  The key to finding a color that pleases me is to find the most drab, least popular color available.  This is how it turned out:

  

Paint

The photos from the last post were taken February 9th and nothing had been done since then aside from waffling about what to do with the walls and how much money it should cost.  All of the large furniture in the living room was clumped together in the middle, all of the small furniture in the living room was stuffed into the solarium, and all of the objects d'art were sitting dust-covered on the dining table.  I shouldn't be using the past tense here because all of those things are still in that condition.  I could very effectively ignore this because I've been out of town Monday thru Thursday every week for the last 3.5 years.  This Monday, I started a job where I'll be coming home to the Alamo every night and suddenly finishing the project has been moved up the priority ladder.  I made a motion to finish the scraping and slap some paint on the walls because it would be fast and cheap and then we can think about papering when we're rich and bored (I can't wait!)

There are two inspiring rooms that contributed to this idea.  Unfortunately I can only scan one of them in low resolution black and white, so here's the other one which was stolen from the Rejuvenation website.  If you have a lot of money to spend on really great fixtures, check the site out.

The other room is a dark grey-green-brown color that I have a hard time explaining and an even harder time matching.  Maybe someday I'll break out my own scanner which is collecting dust at the very top shelf in the office and scan the magazine page.  Of course, scanners and monitors never show colors exactly right so no two people will agree on what color the room is and it won't do any good anyway.

I picked what I thought were close matches for the inspiration rooms and painted swatches on an already scraped portion of the living room.

I also painted the ceiling with metallic gold paint in keeping with the idea that historic ceiling papers would've been painted with metallic pigments to reflect the new fangled, but dim electric lights.  Well, neither of the swatches made me happy and Steve The Scraper said that the gold ceiling looked like a 1970's discotheque.  Time to continue scraping and mull this over...

Scraping

This is posted a little (or several months) late.

After the burlap came down, we were left with lots of wheaty cellulose glue on the walls which fortunately comes off with hot water and elbow grease.  This is a slow and very boring process and these types of jobs are not really my specialty, I would prefer that Chris take care of the scraping while I look online for new light fixtures.  Chris would prefer that I not pull the burlap down in the first place, so we are at an impasse.

Our very good friend and fellow old house enthusiast Stephen can be bribed fairly easily with a batch of Buffalo Chicken Mac n' Cheese and a 12 pack of PBR, so we lured him over one Friday night to do some scraping.  Here are their smiling, happy faces and our beautiful glue-free plaster:

Wallpaper Stripping

Today I had a plan that I would empty the living room and start stripping the fabric / paper or whatever it is off the walls. Since Chris was suffering from the after effects of drinking unnecessary amounts of LaBatt Blue, I was on my own. First I cleared everything out of the room and put together my fabulous Christmas present that I received specifically for this project:

Then, with much trepidation, I started very carefully pulling away the fabric at a spot where it was falling down already:

AND, due to some amazing balance in the universe, the fabric peeled away in seconds leaving the plaster undamaged underneath. When I stripped the wallpaper in the kitchen, it took most of the finish coat of plaster with it and I had to scrape it with gallons of hot water and it took days. Today it practically fell off the walls. I thought I had it made, I was going to pull down all of this paper while Chris laid on the couch in the den nursing his hangover and when he came downstairs finally the room would be finished and I would be a hero and I could totally milk it for at least the rest of the day and he would be forced to go out and pick up takeout for dinner.

Unfortunately he emerged too soon and saw that the fabric was coming down very easily and that I was actually having a good time, so I was not off the hook at all and had to clean the kitchen and then make dinner while he did man-jobs outside.

Here's how the room looks now:

There's still a large amount of glue on the walls, but the condition of the plaster isn't as bad as I expected. Some areas will need fairly simple repairs, but most of it just needs to be skimcoated. First I have to figure out if I need to do anything about that pesky glue...

Updated Photos

I guess you could call these 'after' photos. Meaning 'after' we moved in. We haven't done anything to the living room except put the furniture in it. Someday when we're very wealthy and have tons of time on our hands, we could fix up the ceiling and walls. The walls are covered with canvas and under the canvas is some very interesting wallpaper, and the ceiling has some mild texture treatment to camouflage some patches. I really love Bradbury wall paper and I would love to paper the frieze and ceiling, but that's going to have to wait until the wealthy part kicks in. This is the way it looks now:

The Before Pics

This is the condition of the house before we moved in. I'll try to post the photos as if you were taking a tour of the house. This is the 'Solarium' looking toward the front door:

These are the windows on the outer wall of the solarium:


Looking toward the dining room from the solarium:


The living room from the solarium:

The living room looking toward the stairs:


The living room from the stairs:


The fireplace, exactly as pictured in the Sears catalog:


The kitchen. The green walls are 20 year old wallpaper. I liked the color and even the pattern of the paper, but it was in bad shape.

The door to the right of the counter is the world's very smallest powder room. I don't have any photos right now, but I'm sure we'll get some eventually. It's so small, that when I threw a baby shower last year, the pregnant woman couldn't use it.

This is the problem wall in the kitchen. The refrigerator door won't open all the way unless it is slightly turned in toward the kitchen and there is no range hood. Also, in order to walk from the stove to the sink, you have to circumnavigate the island which seems OK until you're carrying a big pot of pasta with wet hot pads and your fingers are burning...

The dining room:

The bathroom is in surprisingly good shape. The fixtures could be refinished at some point and that weird tile that was installed to put in a shower could be replaced with more subway tiles, but neither of those things really bother me. Even the window in the shower (not pictured) is in good shape. It's really amazing how well the previous occupants of the house took care of it.