It’s safe to say that the worst thing about our new house wasn’t the brown tartan wallpaper walls matched with the orange curtain in the lady den, the inbuilt spaceship bath/shower combos in the bathrooms or the home-made feel of the kitchen cupboards. It was the lounge room and dining room walls covered in shiny wallpaper. In fact, if you looked at the wallpaper from different angles, you could see different patterns. Yes, a real trip!
The previous owner told me that the people that had built the house had spent $180 per roll for this beautiful wallpaper. Can you imagine how much $180 was back in the late 70’s?!? Thinking about inflation, that would equate to something like $700 a roll now.
One day after dropping Ruby at school, I walked in the front door, looked at the wallpaper and wondered just how easy it would be to take off. I reached up and pulled one of the sheets and it peeled the top layer off, that shiny layer, and left the wallpaper backing. I tried another, then another. It felt so good, so satisfying. Before Ruby got home that day, I had the first layer off the entire room.
The second layer was a little bit harder and required the assistance of Zinsser DIF wallpaper stripper and a Zinsser Paper Scraper along with a bit of elbow grease.
As the wallpaper was put on when the house was built, they had laid it straight over the top of the gyprock. That meant the entire room needed to be primed…lucky me!! I’m not so great with heights and our ceiling is very high so thanks to my dad, he helped remove the wallpaper I couldn’t reach and cut in the high areas for me so I could roll the rest myself. Several coats and elbow tendonitis later, the room was painted. I used Taubmans Crisp White on the walls and Taubmans White On White for the windows, doors and trims.
Pro tip…you’re gonna want to wash the wall with sugar soap after you use the stripper so it doesn’t leave residue on the walls which will bleed through your paint – even if you prime and do 2-3 coats (rookie error!).
The Koo Sheer pinch pleat curtains in white and Caprice Nevada groove rod set in black from Spotlight frame out the window space perfectly. I picked up the wood blinds from a clearance bin at Bunnings for $100 each – saved so much money not getting shutters.
I really needed a black light fixture in the dining room and I couldn’t find anything that I liked that wasn’t over $1,000. The light fixture I settled on was the Aalia 4 Light Chrome Pendant from Early Settler. It was on sale for less than $200. Originally chrome, my cousin and I had fun spray painting it black.
Dining table is the 2.4m Provence Refectory from Eureka and dining chairs are Beige Windsor Scoop Back from Temple & Webster. I would have liked a longer table but the space just wouldn’t take the next size up which was a 3m.
The Hamptons Buffet is also from Eureka (they love me there!). I would have liked to get a wall cabinet but I plan on doing a stone fireplace in the centre of that wall between the dining room and lounge room and I think it would be too much.
There’s always more work to do. I took the sliding door off between the dining room and kitchen and it took a little more moving with a crow bar than I thought. Needless to say I had to damage the wall and patch it up so it has missed this round of wall painting and is on the list for another day. The joys of renovating right!
Have fun!
