Couldn't take the brown rose wallpaper anymore...

Attention recurring and future guests:  your eyeballs will no longer be assaulted by the last remnants of hideous wallpaper in this house.  You're welcome.

We have two real bedrooms upstairs (currently occupied by great new tenants, yay!), and another sort of multi-purpose room that could be a bedroom if it needed to be.  But, like our new entry/mudroom area, it seems to have gained doors over the years that have made it less useful as a bedroom.  In this case, the door to the attic and a hobbit-sized half-door to the crawlspace over our bedroom addition have made it into a weird space that you wouldn't want to put tenants in.  The attic and the crawlspace are full of unsorted grandma stuff and we're constantly going in and out of there. But it makes a perfectly good guest room, and when I started working from home, I also turned it into my office.

The other two upstairs bedrooms got the royal treatment right after we moved in.  They both had lovely intact original plaster and gorgeous clear Southern pine trim that had never been painted/desecrated.  They also both have surprising large closets for such an old house.  We spent a total of a week straight per room scraping off all the painted-over wallpaper and carefully painting them.  They're not terribly fancy because we knew we'd be renting them out, but they look great.  The office/guest room, however, is a different story.

ACK!  My eyes! But that's a sweet vintage desk lamp, no?

Hobbit hole to the crawlspace...the exposed insulation used to be a window back in the day

The pattern is brown with darker brown roses, and to add to the barfiness, it was actually a little bit shimmery.  The reason we didn't give this room the full treatment is because if we had tried to remove this wallpaper, the walls would have disintegrated.  For some reason, this room doesn't have plaster, and instead it's got that nasty 1940s-ish wallboard that is basically glorified cardboard.  You can see all the crooked taped seams underneath the wallpaper.  There is also something weird about the attic stairs.  Something about the way they're placed is awkward.  I haven't figured it out yet, but we will get to the bottom of it someday.

We hadn't bothered to paint this room because the walls just need to come down and it seemed like wasted effort.  However, at this point, doing that is pretty much rock-bottom on the priority list, it was hideous and I had to work in there every day, and we have a ton of extra paint from previous projects.  So one day, after a previous tenant moved out (miss you Jared! Hope you get to shred lots of gnar in Colorado!), that gave me the space to move all the furniture out of this room.  I went paint shopping in the basement and came up with Summer Harvest. 

See that string?  That means this room now has an overhead light!  (You're welcome for that too, guests!)  Before there were just wires sticking out of the ceiling covered by a little canopy thing.  No idea what happened to the old fixture.  I dug out a rug from the aforementioned crawlspace and artfully arranged what may be the world's largest collection of maps of the Androscoggin River.  I gave my sweet old wood Dirigo beverage box the duty of being my recycling bin (obtained at the same auction where we got our maple sugaring equipment), and check out that cool blue desk-turned-sewing-table!

This was given to us by Gabe's friend Will's parents, who recently emptied out their huge old farmhouse after 30 years, sold it, and are off traveling the world.  I just love that chair, the flared base on the left side, and the square knobs.  I also like that blue, but it's a little beat up.  Should I paint it?  Strip it?  We'll see.  But at least my sewing machine has a home other than the dining room table.

The most fun part of this project was that because I truly hope to tear these walls out one day, it was a painting project just like you want painting projects to be - absolutely NO prep, no washing the walls, no removing cobwebs, no filling holes, none of that foolishness.  Just slapping up a coat of paint over some hideous walls.  Awesome. 

Ok, so there's not much for decorating - we do hope to get/build a more functional desk/bookshelf system before too long - but you can't beat a $7 renovation (for the light!).  Next I'll get to sew curtains to cover the windows and the hobbit door - I'm sure our guests will appreciate that too.