I can't date the year, but when the previous owners had left this behind in two places in the dining room. When the room was paneled, the owners had a heat duct put in to the upstairs. The corner of the room was squared up hiding the heat duct, and it too was paneled. I am assuming that was late 50's early 60's. This wall paper was behind the duct when I cleared away the paneling. It also was left under the thermostat as seen above. Before the paper was turquoise paint.
This is another shot of this pattern. It almost looks like a 1940's design.
Yes it is blurry but it is the best I could do on such short notice.
This wallpaper was on a single wall in the dining room in 1976 to match a bright yellow shaggy carpet that was already on the floor, covering up the hardwood floor. The rug was finally removed by my wife and I in 1996 and we refinished the oak floor.
In 1985 I replaced the yellow flowered wallpaper with this pattern. It was in good shape but we have now put sheet rock over it and this wallpaper is gone.My neighbor lady said that she had one room that had 18 layers of wallpaper on the walls, It was a common practice to just paper over the old paper to clean up the walls. Wood burning stoves would make the paper be sooty or the paper would just get dirty and then they would put another layer on top of the other. The paper then was cheap paper with low grade colors printed on them. I can still see my two uncles upstairs in my Grandma's house slapping paper on quickly as they could as if they had done it many times before. I am sure they had. Even in my house, I notice my paper had covered up a huge crack and it really didn't show with the paper on it.
This concludes your wallpaper tour of my house. You can see I need to get out more and quite working on the house for awhile. Thanks for reading......
6 comments:
I so agree, there is something wonderful about peeling off successive layers of old wallpaper and discovering the social history of our houses.
Loved this post, Larry. Big wallpaper designs were popular in the past but they made the rooms seem so 'busy' and overcrowded. With old property I guess the multiple layers of paper helped to keep the rooms warm. I've just posted pics about old places, you might be interested in them.
Aren't those old papers neat? We rented a very old apartment once with many layers of wallpaper, that were then painted over. It would've been fun to see what was behind all the layers.
I love those old wallpaper patterns and remember browsing through wallpaper sample catalogs. What fun!
I remember my mother and sisters wallpapering every few years. But, when I got married I married into a family of painters, so never had to worry about wallpaper, they just painted the walls for me. But, I do remember scrubbing down the wall many a spring day.
It's interesting to see the older wallpaper designs. We don't use wallpapers. Just paint only.
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