On painting the bedroom

From twenty-some years ago, there has been one room in the house that I really disliked.  The workmanship on it was quite shoddy....BAD drywall job!  I applied a 5 gallon bucket of plaster to the ceiling trying to even out the dips.  Finally, settled for so-so.  I was out of plaster, getting arthritic in my shoulder, and I was afraid the drywall might come down on my head with all that added wieght. 

Two of the walls had an old, busy wallpaper on them.  Ugh!

For lack of monetary resources, I painted the ceiling and walls to go with the wallpaper, added a stencil on the painted walls to tie into the wallpaper.  It was OK.  I just made a point of not spending much time in that room.

Forward twenty-two years...I was moving into that Ugh! room.  In moving back onto this property, there were too many pressing needs to be hung up in trying to recoop my new bedroom.

Early one evening I found myself with a leftover bucket of dry-wall mud from that day's project.  Hmmm.  I went upstairs and spread some of it over the wallpaper in the same plastering style I had used on the ceiling and wall two decades earlier. 

My intent was so deflect some of the effect of the wallpaper which was doing nothing good for my mental health.  As I worked, I went back checking for spots where the wallpaper might be lifting from the wall.  There were some spots.  I scraped the loosened paper and applied more plaster.  Now all seemed sound...so sound that it took me a year to get aroound to painting the room.  Just having the wallpaper pattern blotted out made a world of difference, although anyone who came into my room looked at this project rather quizically.

Now I have painted.  What an inexpensive way to totally change an environment!  I went over the wallpaper/plaster combination with a good pigmented, oil-based primer to be sure it would all hang in there.  I learned this trick from a painting contractor years ago.  Then I painted all with a very pale antique apricot.  When I was young I liked burned orange.  Age does change things....now I like peaceful quiet colors.

Frederick was very interested in the outcome of my painting.  His three-year-old experience of painting is with a very small brush and some jars of bright paint.  I could see that he was a bit disappointed when he viewed my finished room....."Dark white," he said and then walked away.  I think he'll be more impressed after I put up some stencilling.  The paint color is a good choice for the background of a stencilling project.  Amanda has a book of the most charming Craftsman stencils...hard to resist.

Now I learned some things with this paint job.  I had been hoping that we could use the plaster on wallpaper process in the livingroom which is 36' by 36'.  Sure would save a lot of time of wallpaper removal.  In the bedroom the imperfections in the drywall job that had the wallpaper did not show up until after the color coat had dried.  If I had taken the wallpaper off, I would have noticed and evened things with plaster.  We need to study the livingroom wall closely before we make a decision about what to do.  The living room paper is not the busy affair that hung in the bedroom, so it won't hide the imperfections as well.  But, we need a very thorough survey before committing plaster to wallpaper on this one.

Comments

[Veronica]

I too have discovered the joys of oil-based primer over wallpaper. Our ceiling was wallpapered in the 1960s and to remove it would have meant replacing the drywall. The paint job is just fine.

Another thought for rooms with imperfections, have you thought of using textured paint? Some of the new products are pretty amazing. Ralph Lauren at Home Depot has some nice examples. I'm not too sure though you'd want to do that in the main room.