There
are at least a dozen different wallpapers predating the 1960's in our
house. The picture on the right is one of the most perplexing questions I
have about the house. It is a picture taken after we opened up a part
of the wall in the adjacent room and were able to see inside of the
foyer ceiling. This tells me several things: that the stairs and foyer
ceiling were added (they are built with dimensional lumber and circular
sawn lath). It's easy to imagine that older wood was
reused here, which could explain the presence of wallpaper, but why is
the paper on the right wrapped down over the old timber? It looks like
it was purposefully applied that way. Could that mean that the inside of
the ceiling here was once exposed and wallpapered? The rest of the
paper could have been removed when the the knob and tube wiring was
added (1880-1930s)? I have no idea. Does anyone else have ideas?
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| Wallpaper inside ceiling. |
Below
is my favorite wallpaper so far. It was hidden behind a piece of trim
inside of a closet. So this wall was papered, then sometime later trim
was added and the rest of the paper above it was papered and painted
over several times. There were three layers of wallpaper here, this
pomegranate paper being the most recent.
 |
| Acanthus leaf wallpaper |
This
is more of the acanthus leaf paper with another paper over it found
after removing some of the plaster and lath inside of a closet. It
might be hard to tell here, but there are two additional layers of
wallpapered wall under this one. The last one is on some kind of wood
paneling.
Update: 4/5/12
We
have begun renovating the bathroom that is adjacent to the wallpapered
closet above. That wall continues into the bathroom but was dry-walled
over until a couple of weeks ago. Under the drywall is a tongue and
groove wall covered in 6 or so layers of wallpaper. I pulled two nails out and they are Type B cut nails circa 1810-1825 which is consistent with most of the nails I've found throughout the house.
 |
| Type B cut nail from wall above- circa 1810-1825. |
 |
| This cut-out was done pre-us. We have covered over this wall with drywall. |
 |
| Top layer of wallpaper. This looks early to mid 20th century to me. Not sure though. |
 |
| Somewhere in the middle. |
 |
| Second to the bottom layer. |
There
are at least a dozen different wallpapers predating the 1960's in our
house. The picture on the right is one of the most perplexing questions I
have about the house. It is a picture taken after we opened up a part
of the wall in the adjacent room and were able to see inside of the
foyer ceiling. This tells me several things: that the stairs and foyer
ceiling were added (they are built with dimensional lumber and circular
sawn lath). It's easy to imagine that older wood was
reused here, which could explain the presence of wallpaper, but why is
the paper on the right wrapped down over the old timber? It looks like
it was purposefully applied that way. Could that mean that the inside of
the ceiling here was once exposed and wallpapered? The rest of the
paper could have been removed when the the knob and tube wiring was
added (1880-1930s)? I have no idea. Does anyone else have ideas?
Kerry, when I removed the layers of wallpaper and paint (paint over wallpaper should be a capital offense, it came down like paneling because it was so thick. The bottom paper turned out to be the same color that I decided to paint, so I left a small section of the paper on the wall and painted around it.
ReplyDeleteThat's so funny, Beth. Those Victorians seemed to wallpaper anything that didn't move. It's amazing how they did the inside of closets, even the ceilings!
Deletecheck out the attic of our old house - I left the paper intact--- 1880s... carol
ReplyDelete