I grew up in a house full of layered wallpaper, often alternated with painted layers. The living room had that faux wood panel pressed carboard on the walls. We lived with each new layer exposed for a few months in the beginning, and then got rid of it. By a couple years in, everything from the drywall up was ours; and often we'd done the drywalling, too.
The house was built in the 60s. That awful first era, when suburban track family housing with a white picket fence and a caddy out front became the american dream?
It had never even occured to me to preserve what are usually (what I have been trained to see as) the half-assed attempts to cover the walls applied by unskilled workers. Wood detailing, things that are valuable now (and possibly, I don't know, very OLD wallpaper) I can understand preserving... but ... isn't part of the point of wall paper that it's a covering, to protect and beautify the walls for a time?
Thank you for sharing, though, it is an interesting viewpoint. In the SCA, I learned how hard it is to figure out the detailing of textiles and other "disposable" items of the past. I honestly hadn't thought of applying preservation principles to making homes.
I've got comments to write about the house in general, old wallpaper, and the decision to paint, but my started getting long enough that I decided to put it off until I'm more awake and make it its own entry
Patches of three layers of wallpaper have been photographed, and I'm going to try to scan a scraped-off piece of the other one.
My house was built in the 60s too. The 1860s. (At 136, it's not quite as old as juuro's though.) It's actually a pretty neat house; it just needs lots and lots of work (and money) to bring out the glory lurking in it.
*huh*
The house was built in the 60s. That awful first era, when suburban track family housing with a white picket fence and a caddy out front became the american dream?
It had never even occured to me to preserve what are usually (what I have been trained to see as) the half-assed attempts to cover the walls applied by unskilled workers. Wood detailing, things that are valuable now (and possibly, I don't know, very OLD wallpaper) I can understand preserving... but ... isn't part of the point of wall paper that it's a covering, to protect and beautify the walls for a time?
Thank you for sharing, though, it is an interesting viewpoint. In the SCA, I learned how hard it is to figure out the detailing of textiles and other "disposable" items of the past. I honestly hadn't thought of applying preservation principles to making homes.
Re: *huh*
Patches of three layers of wallpaper have been photographed, and I'm going to try to scan a scraped-off piece of the other one.
My house was built in the 60s too. The 1860s. (At 136, it's not quite as old as