I’m a pretentious college art professor by day. I enjoy teaching my students big words so they can write dense papers and bore people at cocktail parties. Of course, of my favorite words is PALIMPSEST, which means that a text has been erased and rewritten over and over again. During the middle ages, parchment was incredibly expensive to produce, as it had to come from thin layers of calf hide. It was waaaaay easier during the Middle Ages to just scrape off the ink and gold leaf and start over.
To tell the truth, the most fun I’ve had in our house has been peeling through 100-plus years of wallpaper. These layers of wallpaper tell the story of the house in ways the fixtures and walls themselves can’t. In most places in the house, there are only a few layers. The previous occupants even committed the cardinal sin of painting over wallpaper (making it almost impossible to remove). Our kitchen, however, was a glorious scrapbook of changing styles and and wallpaper technologies. Check out the first photo that I posted. It shows the 80’s floral borders that graced much of the house when we moved in. Unfortunately, they haven’t stood the test of time. There are a few other layers visible in the photo as well.
Claire has written about our kitchen before…it’s the first room in the house she started peeling wallpaper in. When she started tearing into the 80’s floral nightmare, she found all of the other layers, but then found out that the bottom layer was just redwood planks covered with cheesecloth. We knew that we’d have to hang drywall, so it’s taken us over three months to get around to it. The whole time, we’ve been living in a kitchen full of wallpaper scraps and exposed planks.
The very bottom layer of wallpaper is the gorgeous hand printed turn-of the century wallpaper above. I’ve enlarged a couple of flakes for texture. The wallpaper printers used delicate colors and metallic inks. I hate wallpaper, but if we had been able to perfectly peel back the others and preserve the bottom layer, I would have considered it. It wasn’t an option, however, because with each new wallpaper job, the new owners stapled through all of the previous layers, ruining the wallpaper below.
The next wallpaper in the stack is also a doozy, beautifully hand printed with random flowers and patterns. I can’t quite figure out the era…could it have come from the teens or early 1920’s?
Here’s a spartan wallpaper that must have been put up at some point during the Great Depression. We found out from the previous owners that the house was stripped of most of its gingerbread trappings during the 30’s and turned into a more severe, minimalist house. The few remaining vintage lighting fixtures in the house date from this era.
At some point after the dour wallpaper, one of the residents livened it up with these cute flowers!
Holy cow!!! At some point, our kitchen was totally Don Draper’s kitchen from Mad Men! During the 50’s, somebody put up this fabulous masculine plaid! It’s too bad that tastes changed and the 70’s happened. I wish we still had the avocado-colored stove that surely complimented the wallpaper.
Like I said. After the 70’s, it was all floral wallpaper, all the time. you can see the floral borders from the 80’s on the first photo I posted. We tore into a lot of the wallpaper, but ultimately, since we decided we were putting up drywall, we left most of it for future owners to experience when they tear down the drywall.
Our house contains plenty of other palimpsests and riddles. One of the biggest remaining mysteries is what is under the flooring. We’ve found nice fir floors under the carpet in our living room and laminate in our kitchen and dining room. We’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, and the floors don’t bother us too much, so we’ll leave the mystery for another day. The flooring upstairs is a little more nerve-wracking…it looks like there are layers of creepy, worn-out linoleum underneath the carpets. We’ll find out soon enough what’s under the linoleum. Our inspector told us that there wasn’t much chance of asbestos, so that makes us breathe a sigh of relief.
I hope you enjoyed the wallpaper tour of our kitchen…I feel like it’s an appropriate way to honor the interior decorators who came before us.
My kitchen was also the place where the best old wallpaper layers lived. I really wish I could have duplicated the one from the 40’s with gold-leaf appliances and stars on it. They just don’t make wallpaper like that any more.
(^_^)
We’ve had some pretty funky wallpaper suprises over the years, including a discovery of the most beautiful fire place tiles & a secret door in the attic!
) nothing can beat the 200 year old beams though =P
Garth, you should frame a swatch of your favorites and hang it in the kitchen. Those older ones are amazing works of art!
Oh wow. I totally recognize two of those wallpapers from my mom’s house. =)
Hi Johnsons! I have really enjoyed reading through your blog. I feel I must tell you about a floor treatment that we discovered when we restored our Edwardian house in Victoria, BC, recently. To our delight, the entire house was floored with wide edgegrain fir, buried sometimes under years of lino, laminate (which we tore up and sold) and other odds and ends. We had heard about treating floors with oil, in the European tradition, as being superior to varnishes, which crack, don’t nourish the wood, and need refinishing, resulting in a floor that lasts only 3 restorations, rather than a floor that should outlast the house. We researched and did test patches and then finally took the plunge. We had a professional sand down the floors and patch where needed. Then we simply poured the oil (we used Penofin, but we’ve heard hemp oil is another great product) into a paint tray and rolled it on (we used a small brush to go around the edges). We rented a janitor’s lino buffer thingy for a day and bought a couple buffer pads, and ‘drove’ over the newly oiled floor with it to polish it a bit, then did another oil coat a few days later. Two years on, the floors gleam more and more with use. People walk in and ooh and ahhh, but have no real idea what they are looking at. The best part is, spills and scratches don’t matter any more. The wood is deeply nourished and can handle spills, which don’t permeate it anyway, and scratches are easy: just spot buff with some sandpaper and reapply the oil.
This has been a bit of a rant, but considering the horror with which we now regard the fruitless pursuit of eyeball searingly shiny plasticated floors, I had to share the good news. Keep on enjoying your house and thanks again! Heidi
I just have to tell the world about wallpaper we had scrape off in our bedroom; it had
water skiers, boats, boat docks, and buoys on it. Also after quite a few layers of lime sherbert paper in the kitchen someone had put up contact paper instead of wallpaper of course in avacado, orange and wheat yellow flowers. Actually the contact paper was very easy to pull off and preserved the wall pretty nicely.
Thanks for the flooring tip Heidi.