Dining Room Retrospective

As I've mentioned before, a lot of work was done to this house in a short amount of time after we moved in -- thanks in large part to our wonderful friends and family. The dining room was the first area to take considerably longer than we expected, because there were a couple of surprises waiting for us.

Here is the dining room right after we moved in. Nothing horrible about this room. It was just a little plain for our taste:


We decided to paint the walls red and replace the chair rail with a more substantial one. Simple, right? Except that when we took the old chair rail off, it was stuck to wallpaper. Lots and lots of wallpaper. There were perhaps five layers of wallpaper from the chair rail down to the floor.

We tried to remove the wallpaper, and we were able to get through a couple of layers. We tried all sorts of techniques, but it was going to take forever.

Here is the dining room during the process, with one coat of paint on the top and layers of wallpaper still on the bottom.


Finally someone (I can't remember who, but it was one of us that had been soaking and scraping wallpaper for a few hours) came up with the solution: wainscoting. We just covered up the wallpaper (as so many generations before us had, but this time with something other than more wallpaper).


Here it is after we put it up and filled all the cracks and holes:


And the final product:


One of the main reasons I'm keeping this blog is so that someday we can look back and see what we've accomplished. We're pretty proud of the dining room.