**Please Note** The little brick cottage renovation project took place and was originally posted here in 2012! It was my first project I posted on as well. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see posts on this entire project.
Well I know what lies beneath now, because I have been busy with wallpaper removal!!!
And I have the bandaids on several of my fingers to prove it. As I was scraping with a wide blade putty knife, I kept scraping my knuckles on the rough plaster wall, ouch.
It was a complete surprise that there was the original wainscot hiding under layers of wallpaper and skimcoat in the dining room.
But it’s out now, as the chair-rail height wainscot is now exposed and ready to be prepped for paint. Unfortunately, there was a large area in the NW corner that was patched with plaster. It looks like it was originally a doorway, a long, long time ago, because the patch was a really old lath and plaster patch. (Rumor has it that this “Little Brick Cottage” was originally a 2-story and lost the top story in a cyclone in the late 1800’s…I’m doing research on that and hope to find some old photos.) The picture above shows the paper and plaster part completed. From the corner to the outlet is a plaster patch, no wainscot there. Then to the left of that corner, where it just looks like plaster too, is actually the layer of skimcoat covering the wainscot. I have the wallpaper off there, but when I took this shot, the skimcoat was still on.
This is the wall in the kitchen and the original wainscot we found under the 1970’s sheet of paneling.
We are not going to be able to restore it for the kitchen, so fortunately, there is enough beadboard on this wall in the kitchen to steal from and use to patch that dining room corner with.
So now this is the corner in the dining room with the ‘patched’ beadboard from that kitchen wall I just showed you. You can see too, left of the corner I now have the skimcoat removed from the beadboard.
However, the whole wall with the 2 windows has no wainscot on it.
We do not have enough from the kitchen to patch all that with.
But I have a plan… I’m thinking on the window wall, since the dining room is nice and spacious, we can afford to give up 12” for a built-in book shelf, so that’s what I think I’ll do there. I’ll just design it so the top of the bookshelf relates to the same height as the beadboard chairrail, and it’ll look like it was a plan all along. (hopefully) Maybe I’ll incorporate some ‘window seats’ under the two windows in the long bookshelf.
The chimney corner doesn’t have any beadboard either…
hmmm…
I have a couple of thoughts about that, but I’m still pondering. Just to paint it may be the simplest answer, we’ll see what I come up with, and feel the budget can afford.
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