All The Things!

If there's one thing I hate it's cheesy wallpaper. You know the kind. The super ratty floral print that's designed to look old but immediately gives you a migraine and flashback to sitting in your grandmother's kitchen on Thanksgiving and she's trying to force feed you Brussels sprouts... Only the stuff that I'm whining about is even worse. Yes. It CAN get worse. It can be tar stained from years of gratuitous smoking, poorly installed, and lifting. Yep... Wallpaper Hell is a place on Earth and that place is this old mansion's scullery and the stairwell of my servant's staircase. I kid you not. Not only did someone place horrific white latex paint over the wood work in that location, but they decided to paper it in the most heinous and hideous "antique feel" wallpaper they could possibly find. Only it's totally country home and not Victorian... And even then I'd rather see the factory that produced it burnt to the ground than allowed to produce another roll and have it plague a country farm home. I wouldn't even wish this stuff on my husband's ex-wife's home... That's saying a lot (you're welcome). Needless to say, the area is a hot mess and is now in a state of flux as we begin to restore it... No matter how hard we clean, it still looks gritty - and we can all thank smokers and neglect for that screw job.

Don't believe me? Challenge accepted.

Feast your eyes on this degree of "restoration" failure!

Properly horrified? Good. You should be.

The idea now is to take out that handy dandy heat gun and strip it off 100%, fix the missing portion of wood, replace the hand rail with something more appropriate than the cheap mess that's currently there, and likely put a wood wainscot in before painting. The risers to the stairs will be covered in tin tile that will either be painted white or stained dark to match the tread once we refinish and stain it... I'm starting to lean towards the white stain in order to help brighten things up and give tired night eyes a fighting chance at not falling up the stairs - it's possible, I've done it... Many times.

As you can see in the above photo, someone got lazy and painted the stairs white and hid their laziness with a runner rug - the evidence of which, aside from the slip shod paint job, was an ill-placed and raised nail head that wound up in my foot shortly after we moved in. It wasn't cute or appreciated... There was cussing, a lot of it - and then I annihilated the nail and went looking for the rest of its family in a manner that would have made Al Capone a very proud man. The bottom portion of the stairs happens to be a darker area of the home, that's for certain. The scullery window is currently taken up by a rather ugly AC unit... It's being kissed good bye in favor of lead or stained glass, and I have no doubt that will help brighten things up.

Speaking of stained glass, the window at the first landing of those stairs will be replaced with it. Why? Because magnificent and colorful, that's why. But for the rest of the stairwell, I'm honestly not yet sure what color to paint it... Or if I'll be going in and stenciling with period correct design - but I know it'll be 1000% better than what's there now.

Wanna make a paint motif suggestion? Please do!

ALSO! Due to request and recommendation, The Battle of Chiroptera is being turned into a self published novella and will be available soon! I'll be posting it on the blog - but for those of you who would like a signed and limited edition printed copy, I'll have a few available that can be obtained through a small donation to the Mansion's restoration fund! More info on that will be posted soon.