Total transformation: the living room

I think it's time to take a few steps back and look at how far we've come with one room in particular: the living room. It's hard to believe that we closed on the house and began working just three short months ago. Going back through pictures, this is not even the same house. The change is unbelievable!

Let's start at the beginning.

Here is the living room just after closing, exactly the way we bought it:







The walls were covered with peeling, stained wallpaper. The ceilings had these horrible, weird panels with odd designs etched into them. The light fixtures were old and covered in dust. It was dingy and dark, and I had more than one thought of "why in the world did we buy this dump?"

So, we started ripping down wallpaper.



This sounds simple. But it wasn't. Layer after layer after layer, and we weren't getting anywhere. Chemicals, steamers, and scorers... it was taking forever.







At this rate, we would be lucky if we finished one room in a year. And every single room in the house was just like this one. This is when we realized we needed some help.

We brought in a contractor, who informed us that what we thought was the drywall beneath the last layer of wallpaper (the brown in the photos) was actually a thin layer of gypsum board. Beneath that gypsum was even more wallpaper, on top of solid wood beadboard. Fourteen layers of wallpaper in total.

Let me take a moment here to mention that our house was built around 1920. Now, I'm no mathemetician, but from my calculations 14 layers of wallpaper means that there was a new layer of wallpaper added every six years. Every six years! These people were seriously wallpapering junkies.

So we switched gears, and we started ripping down the gypsum board.



Branden is using our favorite tool, the Fat Max crowbar, to dig in to the wall.



You can see the solid wood beadboard peeking out from underneath the last layers of paper. We found that the very last layer was actually newspaper, which was used as insulation back then. The pages were from a 1921 edition of the Boston Sunday Post. I saved the front of the sports section, which included a headline declaring the grand opening of the Yankees' new ballpark. I plan on framing it as a memento of this crazy undertaking.

Here's a debris pile with some of the newspaper pages on top:



Once we got all of the gypsum board off, we were able to pull down those horrible ceiling tiles and put up some modern, flat sheetrock. We also chucked the built-in china cabinet that once lived in this corner of the room. Since it wasn't original to the house and was made of cheap particle board, it was an easy decision. We gained a lot of space in that corner by getting rid of it.



Next came drywall on the rest of the walls.





Once the drywall was mudded and sanded a few times, the primer was able to go on. This alone brightened the room up so much. Things were starting to come together.



Then the most exciting part: paint color!





We chose Benjamin Moore's Shaker Beige. I love the color so much and highly recommend it. The tones are deep and lovely, and it changes throughout the day. The room was topped off with gorgeous crown molding.

It took so much work, I can hardly believe how far the room has come. Let's go back again to the beginning, just to fully appreciate the transformation.

Before


After











Lucy is obviously thrilled with the way things turned out! I couldn't be happier either. The room is warm, inviting, comfortable... everything you want in your home. Looking back at what we started with and where we are now, I truly believe that anything is possible. There's still more to do, of course, but for now I'm happy to just be enjoying this room and planning out where holiday decorations are going to go in a few months... :)

On to Plan B...

There are many things in life that are better left to professionals. Like training orcas. Or servicing a space shuttle. Or flying an airplane full of babies and kittens through a railroad tunnel. One more thing that I will now add to that list: replacing walls and ceilings in a 100-year-old house.

This weekend we brought a contractor in to take a look at what exactly we were dealing with on these walls. Cause we have no clue. Much to our surprise, the drywall-looking material underneath the seven layers of wallpaper in the living room (which we'd already spent about 25 hours steaming and scraping off) was not actually the bottom layer of the wall at all. It was a very thin layer of gypsum board, about a quarter of an inch thick. And underneath that gypsum was another four or five layers of wallpaper, the last of which was actually newspaper pages from a 1921 edition of the Boston Post. (We found the front page of the "Sporting Section" with the date and a headline about the Yankees preparing to open their new ballfield in Gotham… Yankee Stadium. Though I'm a born Sox fan, it was still cool to see that little bit of history built into the walls of my house.)

Here are some shots of the newspaper scraps:

Anyway, underneath all those layers of wallpaper and newspaper was solid wood beadboard. Surprises abound!

At this point, our contractor advises that the best thing to do is to rip all of the gypsum down and drywall the entire house. While we're at it, we're ripping out the weird ceiling panels that nobody has ever seen before and installing nice, flat, modern sheet rock. So right now our house is being gutted, from bottom to top, and completely modernized with brand-spanking-new ceilings and walls. It's going to feel like a completely different (and livable!) house when it's finished.

The dining room ceiling and walls are all down now:

And the new ceiling is partially up in the living room:

This alone has made a huuuge difference in that room. The ceilings feel so much higher!

I couldn't be happier about having professionals doing this work. It would literally have taken us years upon years to get the house to where they'll be able to get it in just a matter of weeks. Move in day is Sunday, so it looks like we'll at least have most of the construction done in the downstairs by then!