« a few more plants | Main | towards really not leaking anymore »

April 20, 2006

remnants of Victorian wallpaper

In scraping the walls of the hallway, we find the ghosts of old Victorian wallpaper.

Since we've backed off on trying to get all of our work done in the 3 year window of the tax abatement, we've been trying to get all of our necessary big projects complete and also fix up the spaces that we won't be getting to really work on for maybe a few years. The upstairs hallway is one of those spaces.

We've recently installed a new door to the porch and put up the scavenged hallway balustrade. We've also started patching areas of rotten plaster. Along with this, we've been trying to scrape some of the layers of wallpaper and texture off of the wall. (When the house was converted into a duplex, one of the rude things that happened was that every wall surface was then covered in this sprayed texture, probably to hide cracks and damage.)

This texture is layer in itself and has been peeling up fairly easily in the hallway, exposing the remnants and residue from the wallpaper that was there before. It seems that there has been more than one layer of wallpaper over the years, and that originally it had been applied in a 4-pattern mix on the walls in the hallway. There was a larger bottom zone of wallpaper, with a 3 to 4 inch border of paper between that and another 2 foot zone that had another border against the ceiling. The main pattern was floral and the first border echoed that. The top zone at this point is lighter and silvery, the bottom is darker. None of what is left is salvageable; it is barely visible and very tattered.

Posted by john m at April 20, 2006 6:45 AM

Comments

Post a comment