dining room in-progress... or, the bad things people do to houses...

Steven steaming off the top border. With 10+ foot ceilings, this is fun!

The steaming of the wallpaper has begun... and again, I am reminded how much I really dislike wallpaper. I think it looks super in other people's houses. I really do. But in my house, the previous owners put up horribly ugly paper (very poorly, I might add), and I am getting tired of removing it. The nice thing is, our walls are plaster - so all we have to do is steam it off. It's those poor suckers with drywall that have to use the chemical remover that are really hosed.

With one wall nearly done, this is what we've got:


Right away, I have some problems to work out. Someone did a bad sponge painting job. At one time, this covered the entire wall. The next paint job was texture paint on the top half of the wall, and wallpaper on the bottom half. Therefore, the bottom half of the wall is smooth, the top half is textured - except for near the ceiling which is smooth because they did a border up there.

This means I cannot just prime and paint the walls. I don't want to sand off all the texture paint because (1) I actually like the old textured look and (2) that would be a giant pain.

My other issue is that the dining room joins the entry way. There is an archway between the rooms, but there isn't a clean distinction between the two rooms. (This is where I showed you in a previous post that the baseboard goes from stained to painted and looks really silly!)

Finally, you can see we have a little window there in the wall that looks into the kitchen. I am not a fan of the little window, although it was original to the house. On the kitchen side, we've installed beadboard backsplashes (which is what you see inside the window there). On the dining room side, I plan to keep the window, but obviously not with the backside of the beadboard showing. (ahhh, clever one, aren't I?)

I have a solution for these problems, which makes my project just a smidge bigger, but will be super cute in the end. Stay tuned for that!

Here is a close-up of the sponge paint. It is peachy-pink, seafoam green and dark green over white. Which would not be so bad if they had actually done a good job...

This is the archway between the dining room and entry way. Steaming off paper revealed someone had painted flowers on the arch. Which might have been nice if they hadn't used the latex house paint from the dining room instead of a more appropriate medium Weird!