Bob: This is the north corner of the dining room, left doorway goes to the pantry, right doorway to the kitchen. This is going to be one of the harder rooms to complete, mostly because of the amount of woodwork and wall problems in here, and because its central location keeps it in use for so many other things. You can't go through the house without going through this room.
Nan: The Dining Room is the heart of the house. Can you imagine the family
gatherings that took place here over the past hundred or so years?
Bob: This is the only picture of the upper hole (before I widened it) in the wall between the dining room and the living room, excuse that this is the same pic as in the utility-room-before page. This piece of wall contains all the water pipes going to the second floor, and when pipes froze some years before now, they broke here. The plumbers hired by the sellers hacked into this wall in two places to fix leaks, and left the holes for us...
Nan: This house is holey!
Bob: Houses of the Holey...;-}~
Bob: I widened the upper hole out to the adjoining studs, so a proper patch would be well suported. This not only turned out to be a mistake (I probably could've patched the original hole much easier), but I threw out the chunk of wallpaper as well. It would've done just fine for the bottom hole. Oh well, live and learn...
Visible here is also some ceiling damage from water loosening the ceiling texture. Fortunately, the ceiling is solid, and we don't have to do any drywall repairs to it.
Nan: Someday this room (along with the living room) will get a total remake. Until
then we will make this work.
Bob: Here's that upper hole with a big chunk of sheetrock stuffed in it. Wall holes are easier to patch than ceiling holes, but harder to make invisible, mostly because of cutting, sticking and blending the wallpaper.
Nan: Plugging away at the holes eventually gets it done.
Bob: This is the lower hole on the same wall, with visible pipes and a large chunk of wallpaper and sheetrock surface binder peeled off. It woulda been nice if them plumbers hadda saved the stuff they took off, but noooooo, they couldn't do that... Hardest part, other than figuring out how to repair the damage, was matching the texture of the original wallpaper. It turned out to be thicker and more unique than we had forseen. Also, there were a number of places where the wallpaper was peeling off from the wallpaper underneath. Not as bad as the bathroom, but enough to warrent some gluing and pressing time. The area at the top of this picture peeled off pretty easily. Fortunately, the rest here was solid enough to allow us to just restick this part back up.
Nan: Someday, someday....no holes.
Bob: Like batter-whipped Sunbeam Bread, Nan? ("It has no holes.") (I couldn't resist...)
Bob: The first step was to reattach as much of the original wallpaper as possible, except for the areas immediately around the damage. I used contact cement, which is not optimum because of the potential for a bumpy result, but for this thick vinyl wallpaper, it proved to be just fine.
Nan: By this time, all I wanted was for it to be done!
Bob: And, by the way, how do you like that color, eh? I call it burnt country orange,
probably invented by General Sherman during his rampage through Atlanta ;-}~
Bob: Next, I squared up the edges of the hole and layer damage next to the hole, so I could cut pieces of sheetrock and wallpaper to fill them in. The left edge of the hole has been cut with a slight bevel, to help support the sheetrock. The right edge has been extended to halfway over a stud for major support.
Nan: Nasty-looking hole, huh?
Bob: Here, the patch for the bottom hole has been fabricated from sheetrock, and trimmed to fit very snugly. Even though this will all get several layers of wallpaper, the top and bottom edges of the patch have virtually no support. I'm counting on a tight attachment on the right (to the stud) and a wedge fit on the left (against the bevel) to hold this plug in place.
Nan: Bob did a wonderful job of making this all invisible. If I didn't know it was
there in the beginning, I'd never know it.
Nan: We went to a discount paper supplier in Frankfort to get this wallpaper. It is not an exact match, but by the time we finished the application and got it painted, it didn't show at all. Again, such a fine job of making it dissappear by Bob.
Bob: After several rounds of drywall mud, with the surrounding wallpaper cut and
drawn back, the underlayment wallpaper has now been applied. Not only is my replacement
wallpaper thinner than the original, but the haphazard removal of the original wallpaper
by the plumbers also removed layers of cardboard from the sheetrock. It took three layers
of the new wallpaper to fill in this depression.
Nan: I have hung many a piece of wallpaper, but never with contact cement. I love wallpaper, and maybe someday we will hang some real wallpaper in this house.
Bob: I had to tape down my wallpaper chunks to the bench so they wouldn't curl up
while the contact cement dried. Most of the surfaces took two applications of glue
to be sure the joint would bind evenly and tightly, with no voids.
Bob: Here, the upper patch has been mudded several times, and, with the existing edges drawn back, sanded down level to the surrounding sheetrock.
Nan: Isn't that ugly taupe paint a total disaster? I couldn't wait for that to dissappear.
Nan: "Stick 'Em Up"...sounds like a crime in progress, doesn't it? Well, the only crime here was the mess the plumbers made when they fixed the water leaks. Of course, we're very grateful that we didn't have to pay for all that plumbing repair, but the plumbers could have at least been a bit more considerate when they did the work.
Bob: This was the largest piece of wallpaper I had to stick up freehand, and, of course,
I had to do it twice. The first time, it wrinkled and tore. Groan, what a mess that was!
The existing edges of wallpaper have been glued back in place. The texture of the new
wallpaper, although not a perfect match, was sufficiently similar to be of no significance.
By adjusting the level of the sheetrock patch, I only had to glue one layer of wallpaper
here to be level with the surrounding surface. Whew, that was close!
Bob: There were other areas in the dining room that needed attention, too, like these edges under the window. The window itself needed attention, more than we gave it right now, and we will someday, because tight windows lower the heating bill, but for now, a lick and a promise, with some scraping and primer to stabalize the deterioration. The wallpaper was easy to reattach with contact cement, plus a little drywall mud and sanding.
Nan: Bob did a really nice job of fixing this, only to hide it all behind MusiCom, but
we know it's done right. That means a lot to me. Thanks, Bob!
Bob: This was a particularly persistant damage; it looked simple at first (a tiny little crescent smile), and turned into a much bigger repair. It looked like somebody just bashed the wall here, knocking a chunk of plaster loose under the wallpaper. After attempting to repair it simply by stuffing mud into it, I realized I wasn't gonna get off that easy! Cutting and pulling back the wallpaper exposed the extent of the damage, and four or five applications of drywall mud built it back level again.
Nan: This is exactly why we didn't attempt to remove all that very thick vinyl wallpaper.
If we had pulled any of it off, the entire wall could have crumbled. The replacement of the
lath and plaster is a someday happening. We really needed to just fix this so we could move in.
Nan: Edging toward being complete, he means. He just didn't know that at the time.
Bob: We can't tell you how glad we were to start covering these awful colors. Here
is the first of the primer going up, cutting in all the edges. With all holes completed,
the priming and painting still took three days to finish.
Nan: I love this green color! We took three different shades of paint (light, medium and dark greens) of someone's-mistakes-or-returns (think cheap) from Wal-Mart, mixed them together, and added quite a bit of the white from the living room to come up with this turquoise green. My mother had a kitchen in the 50s nearly this same color. I loved it then, and I love it now.
Bob: Look Ma, no holes! Hooray! This is our color scheme in the dining room, same trim
as throughout the house, same white color on the lower walls as in the living room, and
a unique shade of green for the upper walls. We were so glad to get this room finally
painted, because it meant that our moving plans could commence!
Bob: Here's another view, looking at the doorways into the pantry and kitchen. That hole next to the kitchen light switch is just a dim memory now!
Nan: Every corner of the dining room is "Another View", and they are all just as stunning in the after as this one.
Bob: MusiCom, my larger-than-life musical equipment rack, posed an additional challange
that merited its own page...