Our first project....The Dining Room

One of the things I had wished I had in our old house was a dining room.  So almost immediately after moving in, I volunteered to host Thanksgiving dinner for my family.  Which was to be my incentive to get some work done on it in the next 3 months.  Here's a couple pictures from the week we moved in:

You can see the damaged wallpaper under the window and above the air vent.  The built-in china cabinet also had a broken piece of leaded glass, which my mom had repaired for me for my birthday :)

Seven windows on the first floor have those beautiful leaded glass windows.

Breakfast in Box Land the morning after we moved in!

My goals for this room were to remove the wallpaper, repair the plaster as needed, and then to paint the walls below the plate rail and re-wallpaper the top portion above the plate rail.  Buy new curtains.  Someday when the carpets wear out I will take them out and refinish the hardwood floors underneath.

So, with a LOT of help from my mom, we started by peeling/scraping off the plaid, country-style wallpaper from the top portion of the room.  As you can see in the following photos, we found some interesting wallpaper underneath!  If it's not original to the house, I doubt it's newer than the 20s or 30s.  There was some aqua-green paint behind it -- I've since found the same color behind paper in the downstairs bathroom (former closet, I believe).  Anyways, this gold and white scenery wallpaper wasn't going anywhere.  It's super thin and completely adhered to the wall, so we left it and papered over it.  Which made me kind of happy knowing it was re-buried for someone else to find someday!

Next we had to tackle the bottom portion of the room.  My dad was going to be doing all the plaster repair for this room, and my mom and I were going to be trying to get the old wallpaper off.  I'm not sure I can even describe this wallpaper properly.  It was several layers thick -- the back was like thick cardboard, and the textured top layer was almost plastic-like.  We tried using just spray bottles with water and scrapers, but found we were having to scrape an area 2 or 3 times to get all the layers off.  We ended up renting a wallpaper steamer, and it was still a lot of work, but made the job go a lot faster.

This was my  mom before we gave up and rented a steamer.

It appears the wallpaper has been painted at least 3 times -- gold, dark burgundy, and then white.

Found at least one section of the room with this paper underneath.

Larger view.

What a mess!  This was the only section of wall that had the sparkly flower wallpaper underneath, though.

Found another style of wallpaper underneath in a different section of the room.

Finally decided to rent a steamer for a day.  Much faster and less frustrating.  My awesome mom!

We used blue painter's tape on the woodwork just to keep a lot of the steamy water off of it.  You can see some of the damaged plaster next to the vent, which is where the wallpaper was also crumbling.

Coming along.  Several applications of drywall mud later, the walls are much smoother.

Ready to paint and wallpaper!

Done!

While we were at it, I went ahead and painted the living room too, since I was using the same color and they are adjoining rooms.  The ceiling in the living room has several cracks in the plaster and will need extra work at some point, so I only painted the walls for now. 

And then, about a week before Thanksgiving, I started picking at the wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom, and I couldn't help myself and ended up peeling the whole room.  Matt came home from school and found me on a ladder; not that he was at all surprised.  So now I HAD to do the bathroom before Thanksgiving too!

I don't think I have a before picture of the bathroom.  It had cows on the wallpaper, and it smelled musty and was peeling around the edges.  And it stared at me while I was trying to use the bathroom.

Two of the four walls had drywall underneath instead of plaster, but no one had ever primed them, so it was a disaster trying to take wallpaper off without damaging the drywall.  My dad ended up skimming the whole wall, basically, before we could paint it.

Here's that aqua-green paint again, on the 2 plaster walls.

With a little luck, we made it to Thanksgiving, although I was painting the bathroom 2 days beforehand.  The warmer paint color really brings out the woodgrains all around the rooms.

My first Thanksgiving table.

My 93-year-old Grandpa Petersen even made it to our dinner.  What an honor!  This was our last 4-generation photo with him, my dad, me, and my youngest daughter, as he passed away the following spring :(  Miss you, Grandpa.