From Dornob.com.

I also found some very, very cool retro wallpaper; again the source is from Dornob.com, who links to Second Hand Rose, the largest vintage wallpaper collection in the world, “dating all the way back to the 1860s and featured in museums around the world. Their rolls range from two to four figures depending upon the design, rarity and its origins (including Frank Lloyd Wright originals).” Wow! I’d just like to browse through their wallpaper books– like a history/art lesson in interior fashion, eh?

Some wallpaper doesn’t deserve a rerun. This is the kind of stuff my mom had in her kitchen.

Ew. :-p Gone are the days– thankfully so– of polyester pantsuits and funky orange pool floats lounges with purple flowers. The 70s is an era best forgotten, IMHO.

Ooo, how about this? Surf’s UP, dude!

Ummm.

This is more my style. I like the Victorian stripes and roses, and flocked wallpaper. Mmm.

Check the site for more. Cool stuff there!

Click the photo for a larger view.

I love stripes on walls. But I don’t like wallpaper too much because it’s so difficult to install and so expensive. And in a bathroom, a room where moisture builds up, wallpaper would not stay very long. So I decided to paint stripes on my walls. If you are interested in reading about how I did it, see my post here. It’s not hard, but it is more time consuming than rolling plain old paint on the walls. But I think it has made all the difference. It gives my bathroom a really classy look.

You can go with big fat stripes or stripes that look like they’ve been on diet pills, heh heh. (Good one, huh?) The technique is basically the same. And you’ll never have to worry about curling or peeling wallpaper again!

This is a bird’s eye view of the center if the house. You can see the different rooms (Living Room, Breakfast Room, Kitchen). The central chimney is tucked inbetween these three rooms. Water damage and mildew growth is labeled. The blue lines along the walls show where plaster and lathe needs to be removed. There is a false wall, too. After the chimney was put in, the owners built a false wall on top of the original wall between the LR and Kitchen.The only reason I can think of why they did this was to widen the space to insert a furnace heater duct in the wall between the chimney and the stairwell.

The problem is that they built the chimney and this false wall on top of a plaster wall that had old wallpaper on it (as shown by the blue lines in the above diagram). The wallpaper is so water damaged from the leaky chimney that the mildew has eaten the wallpaper away in spots.

So we’d already torn down some of the plaster and lathe in the Living Room that surrounds the chimney. We’d torn down the false wall and the plaster and lathe on the Kitchen side. Today we finished the Living Room side, by removing two studs from the wall on the other side of the chimney. We then removed the plaster and lathe and wallpaper from this section. In other words, we’ve now got three out of four sides of the plaster/lathe surrounding the chimney down.

Here’s the section before:

Here’s the section after:

Below are photos of the sections of wall we took down. You can see how old the wallpaper is and see the extensive water damage from the chimney. This side of the wall faced the chimney– they built the chimney on top of this wall with the wallpaper left intact. It was doomed to fail, not to mention a great fire hazard.

We still have a small portion of plaster/lathe to remove (the part of the wall toward the Breakfast Room). That will be our most difficult job, because the walls are in total disarray in that area. Originally, there was a full wall there, not a half-wall with doorway. Originally, this was not a Breakfast Room, nor was the Kitchen the Kitchen. Whenever this area was redone, the owners chopped only half of the wall (the bottom half) to open up the space to make a Kitchen and a Breakfast Room. The upper part of the wall is still intact, covered with paneling. Under the paneling are busted sections of old gypsum board, shims of scrap wood, and loads of joint compound.

Once we get this figured out, the rest won’t be as bad. We just have to figure out how to cover the chimney.

We’ve removed the one wall from the Living Room, and part of a wall in the Kitchen. I’d wondered if the chimney was original to the home. We’ve discovered it is not. Bummer. This means that the chimney is of a lower-quality build. The original builder was very careful and thorough with his work. All owners after him were not. This is classic remuddling.

The chimney was built over an existing plaster wall. The plaster wall still has the original wallpaper. I can’t believe they built a chimney on top of a wall with wallpaper! All it took was a little leaking, and the paper rotted. Mildew growth all around the chimney must be removed.

You can see in the above picture the lathe and the plaster. The wallpaper is that brown papery stuff behind the bricks. That blue stuff is paint. After they built the chimney, they smeared joint compound all over the brick, then painted it over. Through the years, they painted it sterile white, then mustard yellow, then pink, then that Eisenhower blue. In the 70s, they smeared paneling glue all over it and stuck fake-wood paneling on top. I could scream in agony.

After days of indecision, we decided not to remove the chimney (yet). It would be a much larger and more expensive undertaking than we are prepared for. I also need my Kitchen and Living Room back soon. We will install an interior chimney liner to vent out hot-water tank vapors. Then we will remove all the plaster and lathe around the chimney, replace the walls with drywall, and paint. I have no idea what I am going to do with the actual chimney, how to cover it. That joint compound is like concrete. I could try scraping off the paneling glue, but that would be weeks of painful work. I sure am open to suggestions.

Here are some close ups of the wallpaper.

Actually, that wallpaper is not even the original wallpaper. There is another layer of wallpaper beneath what you see (it is hard to peel the two apart, but the original looks flecked). I think the layer that you see was put up in the late 1910s or early 1920s, as it has that Art Deco/Art Noveau look.

Even the layers of wallpaper border, at the top of the wall, remained intact.

The good news is I can finally install some electrical outlets since we have the walls open.