One of the few completed rooms in our house is the dining room.
Of all the rooms in the house, this one demanded serious attention!
Here are two pictures from the real estate listing:
Hiding behind all of that pink and blue wallpaper:
Altogether there were four layers of wallpaper dating back to 1940.
Now…underneath the nasty brown carpet was:
There is NO way to describe the smell!
When we took up the carpet (hoping desperately to find hardwood floors) there was years and years of crystallized pet pee powder (you can thank Ariel for that vivid description – she’s spot on though – yes… pun intended).
We were so glad to find hardwood floors throughout the house (under VERY old carpet) and that it was all salvageable. The dining room floors were so bad we had to bleach them before having them refinished.
This was one of the most ickiest rooms to scrub down!
Most people would be embarrassed to post a picture like this…but you’ve already seen Dad in his Oompa Loompa suit so…
At this point of the renovation we began to wonder if the dining room would ever be finished!
Here’s Mom trying to scrape off layers of wallpaper.
Originally we wanted to be able to take off all the old wallpaper and paint the walls.
You wouldn’t believe how many hours it took to scrape off all the paper.
Everyone in the family spent hours and hours over several months working to remove the paper.
We tried so many different wallpaper remover sprays and gels (spending gobs and heaps of money) with only so-so results. Somewhere we read that using fabric softener helps with removing wallpaper.
We were very skeptical but since we tried everything else (short of using a steam thingie), we figured why not try it?
We tried and it worked very well and for very little money.
We wish we had found out about this method sooner, since we bought a house covered in wallpaper.
Unfortunately, even with the paper gone the walls weren’t smooth enough to paint.
Even though we were so tired of looking at wallpaper…alas, we had no choice but to paper.
After looking online at a zillion samples we actually ended up with a very pretty paper from Lowes (and a very good price compared to online stores).
When we took off the wallpaper on the wall with the window, we found a very bad patch job done to repair water damage. It had this chicken wire and coil looking thingies poking off the wall (if that makes any sense!). This was a very big job for Dad. In the end, the wall came out looking great!
One of the first major things we had done in the dining room was to have the floors refinished.
Daddy decided to put up wainscoting panel stuff on the lower half of the wall.
In the next post, we will show you all of the “after” shots.
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Since Dad works for Stanley Furniture Co, we figured we had to own some Stanley pieces.
This is Grandma’s china cabinet that she inherited from our Great Great Great Grandfather’s family (that’s a lot of greats!).
One of our Great Great Great Grandpa’s chairs.
