What Do You Do With a 111 Year Old Dining Room?

You wallpaper it! Finally after three months of back order, my grass cloth for the jail-look-a-like dining room arrived. We got busy this past weekend measuring, pasting, and measuring some more. This is not a how to by any means, just a snapshot of the fun we’ve had in our century old dining room.Morning of. I kid of like this viewpoint. See that light fixture? It’s out of here soon. Guess what it’s getting replaced with?

See the new mirrors flanking the doorway? I’ll tell you all about those soon. I made them out of baseboard molding.

See the white painted buffet? I hate it. Have to repaint it, because my poly yellowed and it looks like a big old mess. And the open door on it? Doesn’t close now that I painted it. Help?

We have these wooden slats in the dining room that we will leave as is, meaning no painting, no covering up. I like the integrity of our old old house and since it is in such great shape, we plan to keep it that way. This meant we decided to put wallpaper, grass cloth specifically, in between the slats and you know what that means? Lots of measuring. LOTS.

Oh and lots of cutting too.

What do you think of the new haircut? Yes those are natural curls 🙂

There’s also more precise cutting.

About an hour later, we had the first piece up.

We’re realizing that some of that white trim you are seeing is a left over bad paint job {not by us} and there might be some showing around the wallpaper once we fit it into the spaces between the slats. Unless I decide to try and get rid of it. Not sure about that yet.

We did finish one corner, and are about half way through. When we cut a piece that just didn’t work for one area we put it in another. At one point hubs suggested “How about we do every other panel?” Hmm, not exactly the look I’m going for, but a serious consideration when we calculated that it took us an hour to do three panels. And there are 30+ to cover.

No worries, the whole lower wall will be covered, no more stripes in the dining room.

The way we see it there’s about seven more hours of this. Now you know what’s happening at the DA house. Wish us luck.