Strip Tease (January 22, 2012)

Once we pulled the boards off the windows of our future living room, the old wallpaper came into sharp relief, hanging in strips that dangled in the sunlight and begged to be peeled. We picked at it like little kids til the room looked like a Robert Polidori shot of post-Katrina New Orleans. 

Like the rest of the house, the structure is rock solid under the rubble, but it looked like a giant had picked up the room and shaken it like a snow globe.

Kevin eventually bought some wallpaper remover, so the old layers lifted right off with a scraper and some gentle pressure. A few days later he was able to sanitize the old plaster with chlorine and resurface it, to prep the room for fresh paint, as seen here. Soon he’ll teach me to “mud,” or resurface plaster, in the other rooms while he focuses on our kitchen and bathroom renovations, which I’ll describe soon enough.

We’ll use Dix Blue, courtesy of Farrow & Ball in Boston (Contributors). Here’s a photograph of our old living room painted the same color;

We’ll transfer most of the old contents into the new room—except for the $25 craigslist “Chesterfield” that amused us through our last year in Jersey City (we’ll probably replace it with a more authentic tobacco leather antique). I’d like to create a stencil to replicate these curtains at 2/3 or 3/4 their current scale, to hang throughout the front rooms of our house. I’d start with a lighter-colored linen and then use the stencil to flock on the pattern in navy velvet.