A wallpaper story This post reminded me of my largest house project ever, which was started by a cat. In our first house in New Jersey, the dining room was covered in a brown grasscloth wallpaper. This was by far not the ugliest room in the house, so at first we didn't plan to do much there for a while. But Fred apparently did not agree with this strategy. He started to stand on top of the piano that was there then and use the grasscloth as a scratching post, which left a nice ragged area in a prominent place. So I started to look at removing the grasscloth, but discovered that it was applied on top of that very cheap 1960s style paneling that every old house that existed then seemed to get magically covered in. The paneling had also been painted white. It immediately became clear this stuff was not coming off, and if it did the wall would look very bad as is. So I started to get a little more ambitious, and decided to try pulling off one piece of the paneling. This actually came off pretty easily, it was just tacked up with tiny brads, but all of the wall mouldings were applied on top of the paneling so they had to come off too. Underneath, I was surprised to find plaster in pretty good condition, except at the bottom where the original 1920s Craftsman-style mouldings had been thoughtfully yanked out. The same genius had also removed the wonderful original broad window mouldings in that room. At this point, as a new homeowner I started to get more ambitious. So all the paneling and current mouldings came out, revealing more plaster in good condition except where the mouldings were gone. A sensible person would probably have either hired someone at this point or put up drywall, but as previously mentioned I was a new homeowner, not a sensible person. So I decided to patch the original paster (which was the old fashioned kind applied over wood lathing). This project only took about six months and a lot of patching plaster and drywall compound to complete. Seeing as there were no mouldings in the room at this point, I figured I should make some, and decided to do the room in natural oak. I fancied myself somewhat of a woodworker, but maybe didn't realize how hard it is to cut mouldings to fit properly in an old house where nothing is straight. Considering that I lacked experience I hired a supervisor and bought a saw. After this saw proved to be not very useful, I then bought another saw (a Delta tablesaw) that worked better, once again proving how do-it-yourself work can save you lots of money by buying over $1,000 worth of power tools. During the project, the dining room was kind of interesting. Since the plaster didn't go all the way down to the bottom of the walls and the 1920s house had no sills at the bottom of the balloon walls, you could see right down into the basement. I learned a lot about working with wood during this project. I also found that crawling around all over the place to nail in new baseboards was actually very good for my sore knee. The results: I was pretty proud of them. I put in all new baseboards -- actually a three piece job composed of a 4-inch flat board, a quarter-round and a decorative top moulding, and tried to reproduce the Craftsman-style window mouldings as best I could. The original windowsills had been chopped off at the ends, so I ended up making new ones from giant slabs of oak I had to order from the mail, using various router bits to shape the wood to resemble the original. It ended up looking like this; my wife picked out some new rollerblinds in an ivy pattern. The resulting room included a built-in bookcase (shown as we were moving out, it did really have a lot of books in it) and a new square casing for the entranceway into the living room. I like our new house a lot better than that one, but I do wish sometimes I could have taken the dining room with me. And I'm not sure I'll ever have the energy again to do a room like that, or the money to hire someone to do it. And it would have never happened at all if it wasn't for Fred.