I cannot believe how tedious scraping anaglypta wallpaper is - wallpaper that seems to have been stuck on with cow glue leaving a grotty sticky mess even after being scraped, rubbed and and washed down with sugar soap!!! its a foul job and I will NEVER buy a house so covered in it again!!!
However it is keeping us occupied in this lockdown period - I am still suffering from lost mojo for the more creative projects so a practical task is the next best thing..... I'm not really patient enough for all this prepping malarkey but I do know that it needs to be done and believe me I'm only doing it once so it needs to be done right!
We have spent over a week engaged in
the thankless task of clearing the paper from the hallway - it feels like
three months but its done and its job well done as its a task I have been
dreading ever since we moved in. Some of it came off in massive satisfying strips but for every big piece there were a million wee nasty scrappy bits that took forever scoring wetting scrapping and scrubbing....I don't think it helps that we haven't got a coherent plan or
idea about what we want to do with the decor once we clear the hideous blown
dirty cream paper off - I've been on Pinterest for inspiration but most peoples
hallways are pretty boring and that wont do for us! Everything is very clean cut and bit too shiny for me although I do like these dark brooding colours they will be too dark for this space.
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| upstairs downstairs.. |
Our hallway is an interesting space - its quite big and has some of the original Victorian features - (sadly not the floor tiles) and its other disadvantage is that its not really our main point of entry. The house is kind of back to front with no road so only a path leading to the 'front' door and porch - most visitors arrive at the back door and enter the house through the kitchen so the hall only becomes apparent when you leave the kitchen for the rest of the house. We haven't had a house with a proper entrance for a long time - our previous 3 (rented) dwellings have all been small cottages - with entry straight into the living area and I have to say while this a cosy arrangement it is very nice it is quite a luxury to have a hallway space again. But how to dress it to get the right reception!!! A big win will be the removal of the pink carpet - but we figured keep it for warmth while winter is with us.
Privileged problems I know - and I realise how lucky we are to have this dilemma especially as we are in lockdown - were we still living in the village of the doomed we would have gone seriously bonkers with nothing to occupy ourselves with no lush garden to enjoy and so really the anaglypta is worth the trade off...... but its now ready for the enjoyable bit - no pain no gain and less sense of achievement! That's my pep talk for today!!!
When the paper came off it left an interesting pattern both on the removed paper and in some places, the wall itself - if the pattern on the wall was more uniform I would kind of like to live with it and even the less uniform bits where the original possibly Victorian wallpaper is left are interesting but a lot of the wall has been butchered and re plastered to put electrics and a new window in so I don't think it something we can make a feature of...
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| if it was all like the left hand side I'd keep it! |
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