Monday, November 23, 2009

Dining Room Progress

The dining room renovation progresses, but slowly. All the awful wallpaper is gone, the cracks and nail holes are filled, and part of the pre-wallpaper primer is up. It's white, so it improves the look of the room. Grandson Robbie is a great help with the wallpaper, cleaning the woodwork of old tobacco tint, and painting on the primer. I have hope that it will soon be presentable....by Thanksgiving......oh gosh! That's only 3 days away! Tomorrow we do some more scooping on my accumulated clutter. Wednesday I cook. Thursday is it!

Saturday, November 7, 2009

I guess I'd better get with it and post something. What with my daily email letters and my Facebook stuff, I seem to empty my brain every day and there's nothing of significance to blog about. No one reads it anyway, but hey!
Thanksgiving is fast approaching and my dining room is still far from ready for dinner guests. Today I drove in to Peoria to the Sherwin Williams store to look for a border that would go with the 20 year old paper I have kept hoping to put on the walls. Well, my 20 year old wallpaper is out of date, even though there's hardly anything but a few dots on it. Funny how the arrangement of the dots can be so significant.
I found a bunch of borders that would be appropriate for this house, cabbage roses and such. One had colors that go well enough with the two papers I originally bought. (I'm installing a darker wallpaper on the bottom beneath the "chair rail.") I just don't know if I want to plunk down $30 each for 2 rolls of border. You can't bring home a sample of the border papers. I'm sorely tempted to just choose all new paper and forget about the cost. Of course, this 20year old paper is now "free," and free is hard to beat. Guess I'll have to get Robin in on the discussion. I want to try the books at Lowes first.
The bare plaster walls are so much prettier than that awful paper that was in the dining room. In one place where the putter-upper overlapped the sheets of paper by 4 inches, we could see that originally the paper was white with the red/white/blue/gray design. Over the years (and undoubtedly with smokers contributing their all) the paper took on a grayish tan overall color that was depressing and downright ugly.
There's a bunch of projects to be finished in the dining room before Nov. 26, not the least of which is to remove the carpet tack strips around the edges and to bring over the lovely hutch that brother-in-law gave us.
I have hope anyway.