Paper Route

Back in the early days when I'd first bought the house, this is what the dining room looked like. It had a dark green wallpaper with tiny colored designs in it, and a less-than-pleasing fruity border up around the top. There were also fancy valance treatments that, while pretty dusty, actually looked like someone had spent some money on them. It took me a while to pull the trigger on this, but it finally seemed best to let it go. So last week, my painter Gary Hudson had a couple of his crew come over and pull that paper down. The room had always seemed pretty dark to me, and I'm ready for it to take on a warmer and attractive feel. It helped to replace the ceiling fan with a more appropriate chandelier.

If the picture to the right here is the BEFORE, then these next two are the DURING and AFTER.



If you read through the post "A Series of Unfortunate Events," you may recall that our dear plumbers failed to glue the drain on the old upstairs tub, and this led to a water disaster in the dining room below it. There seems to be no obvious lasting damage to the floors, but all that water coming down did manage to strip the varnish off the wainscoting along that wall in the dining room. This week, one of Pete's crew put fresh clearcoat along that wall, and it gave off a shiny sheen once he was finished.