Hanging's Too Good For 'Em!

It was bound to happen eventually. Kathy stripped all the old wallpaper from the ground-floor dining room almost two years ago. Since that time, the walls have been bare. Last weekend, we finally got around to hanging the new wallpaper. 'Bout time.

Here you can see some before-and-after work. The new wallpaper is on the right, with the still-bare wall on the left. The funny-looking horizontal stripe above the door is where the picture rail used to go. We took those down before painting and papering. They'll go back up this week, after a little touch-up.

The little wooden panel halfway up the wall in the corner is the door to the dumbwaiter. If you open that up, you'll be looking into the dumbwaiter shaft and the back of the brick chimney. The shaft now has a modern heating duct in it, bringing blessed heat to the second floor.

The job took most of two days, which is about average for us. Hanging wallpaper isn't really all that hard, but if you've never done it, it's trickier than it looks. For one, you've got to match the pattern, so each sheet has to be aligned with its neighbor and then trimmed at the top and bottom. That wastes a lot of paper and doubles the amount of cutting you have to do.

Then you've got to work around obstacles, like doors and window frames. Again, simple in concept but tricky in practice. What do you do when one sheet of wallpaper comes really close to the door but doesn't quite reach? Cut a really thin strip? The walls are never flat and the corners aren't 90 degrees. Plus, with 10-foot ceilings, wet strips of wallpaper are long, heavy, and awkward. Keeping them straight and plumb when they keep trying to stick to the walls is another nuisance. Whine, whine, whine.

Now that we're done, though, we're quite happy with it. That should be the last of our wallpaper projects, too. No more after this. Time to start on outside chores.