Tarkblog

When we first moved in our new house, we knew we would be making some transformations. The house came with a dining room that originally was done up quite fancifully, but looked to be more decorative than useful. We knew we didn’t really need a dining room. We rarely need a place to seat a lot of people, and if we did we could always do it in what will eventually be our new kitchen.

At first we had plans to remove a wall and expand the current kitchen into the dining room, making one large room. However, we changed those plans and as such we decided to make the dining room into our home office (which currently resides upstairs in a small bedroom)

Here’s a pic of the original look of the dining room:

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Notice that the room is covered in a patterned maroon wallpaper with somewhat hideous window treatments. The over the top chandelier and probably-should-be-replaced-carpeting round it out.

The first step in handling this room was to remove the wallpaper. It actually came off very easily; I suppose they used some top quality wallpaper when they did it. However, the paper backing and glue still remained on the wall. We couldn’t just paint over it; it would just peel right off. So we had to remove it, as shown here:

This involved using DIF, fabric softener in a spray bottle, and some long handled razor scrapers.

We did run into this neat gem above the door to the kitchen (click thumbnail for full size image):

It says “Paper by Chuck Vincent, something/25/8795

Scraping was actually pretty hard and exhausting work. It also made a mess with the glue/paper mixture that would fall. We tried to catch most of it on plastic drop cloths, but a lot of it still ended up all over the room.

Luckily, we did have some help. Annie’s sister and future brother in law came to visit over the weekend we happened to be working on that project, so we put them to work. We had all of the scraping done, but the walls still needed to be sanded down - or in this case, we gave everyone pumice stones to help make the walls smooth and make sure all bits of paper and glue were gone:

With the hard work done, we were able to prime the walls for painting:

Which meant it was ready for some paint (Admiral Blue, in this case):

Followed by a second coat, and us pulling up the carpet to reveal the nice-and-mostly-in-good-shape oak floors:

Of course, we had to get rid of the chandelier.

Original:

New:

Next, we installed blinds:

Finally, I had our electrician come over to install a few new outlets in the northmost wall so we could get power to our desks without having to stretch cords.

All we had left to do was to find furniture. We ended up getting some stuff from Crate and Barrel. And our office is done (except for a few odds and ends we still have yet to hang on the walls):

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.