This week's project was scraping, patching and painting the upstairs pink bedroom in Strathmere. Now, this fabulous old house is 104 years old and it still has it's original plaster walls, complete with layers of peeling paper on it. It had the potential to turn into a huge nightmare project, but I kept the scraping and patching to a minimum. I only scraped the areas that had obvious peeling because I just didn't want to get into scraping the whole room down to the plaster. To the left is a not-totally-before shot, more like a halfway shot. I've got the walls scraped, patched and covered with a white basecoat. Ah, yes, that is a box of Cheez-its on the chest. Don't you know that is the food of hard workers? I pushed all the furniture to the center of the room and covered them with some tarps. The door in the background was painted dark pink too, but that will go back to being white when I'm done.
The next image is the other side of the room, you can see the original dark pink that I am trying to cover and some of my patching. The new color is Tea Room Cream by American Tradition. It is a pale creamy yellow. I used that color in my hallways and stairway during my brief time as a homeowner. It's a very pretty neutral color with just a soft hint of yellow. It looks nice with alot of things. The white door in this photo is a closet. Oh, I also painted 14 doors in the house this week too! I'm really tired of painting!Did I mention that I am also doing the ceiling? Even worse peeling and uneveness. Here is a happy shot of the ceiling with a layer of white, over a layer of blue (blue? who had a blue ceiling?) and the raw plaster in a few areas. Check out the cool Deco ceiling lamp! I don't think it has been used in years because no one knows how to turn it on. There are no wall switches in this room to turn on the light, there is just a tiny knob on it. So I think I've convinced my Dad to remove this lamp and put up a ceiling fan with a light in it. Now, where would be a good place to put the pretty Deco ceiling light? Hmm.
Vintage Clothing Themed Altered book update - My theme this month was 'Fantastical Frocks' So for my two page layout, I decided to feature some fantastic frocks by Adrian. He was THE designer for MGM in the late 1930s to very early 40s. He designed for Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Hepburn in the Philadelphia Story and many others. He dressed the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz too. Anyway, once I pasted in photos of those pretty gowns, I didn't want to do anything too artsey to cover them, so my creativity was very minimal on this page I'm afraid. The book had great photos of Normandy, fields and castles etc. It made me think of fair maidens. So I did a 2nd two page layout with a picture in the book of a building surrounded by water. Then I made little doors and put in photos of some John Waterhouse painting of pretty ladies. Kind of a stretch for vintage fashion, but they are wearing pretty dresses!
Bye for now, Carol
1 comment:
Hi Harriet,
It may have once been a gas light, I don't know if it's that old. We hung it, it wasn't originally in the house. It does have a tiny little knob on the underside to turn it on, but most people can't find it.
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