Frank Lloyd Wright Quote

"Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union"

Frank Lloyd Wright

Monday, February 11, 2008

Let's Play Wallpaper Detective

I've got a challenge for you all! Here's a picture of my dining room wall taken in the middle of the wallpaper scraping phase. I've studied it closely, and I think I can piece together all of the various incarnations it has taken on over the years. I'll list them out below, and I'll even throw in the first and last ones for you. Your job is to fill in the missing slots, using only this picture (click on it to see a bigger image).

Note: I went ahead and filled in the rest.




  • 1. Walls: Rusty Red Paint; Trim: Dark Stain (not shown, but deduced from other trim in the room.)

  • 2. Walls: Mint Green ; Trim: Dark Stain

  • 3. Walls: Mystery Wallpaper* ; Trim: Off-white

  • 4. Walls: Gold floral wallpaper ; Trim: Gone!

  • 5. Walls: Blue Floral Stripe wallpaper ; Trim: N/A

  • 6. Walls: 80's Floral Wallpaper (not shown in this picture); Trim: N/A

  • 7. Walls: Devine Blush red; Trim: Devine Icing white (coming soon!)



* #3 was tricky. If you look around the edges of the bare plaster (where the trim used to be) you can see where someone had painted the trim an off-white color. They obviously didn't care about keeping a sharp edge as they painted. That was my clue that there must have been a "mystery wallpaper" that was put up around the trimwork. That layer had to be removed along with the trim before they could put up the gold layer. UPDATE: Read here for the mystery wallpaper Revealed!

5 comments:

  1. Robin's Egg Blue Paint.
    Creamish-peach paint.
    Brown-Tan floral Wallpaper.
    Blue Floral stripe Wallpaper.

    It amazes me on how people all over layered and layered paint, wallpaper etc. with out removing anything. Scraping Wallpaper is such a pain. I scraped for months.
    I just wanted to beat the walls in with a hammer. Our middle bedroom still has at least two layers of wallpaper. Yikes... It is the room we close the door and pretend it's not there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Without looking at other comments:
    2. Green paint
    3. Peachy pink paint
    4. Brown and cream wallpaper

    Oh, look! I guessed the same as Jen

    ReplyDelete
  3. I added the trim to the list above to give a more complete picture of the history of this wall.

    Jen & Jennifer, I'm not sure which peach color you are looking at; it may just be the paper backing from the gold layer of wallpaper.

    #3 is the tough one that requires close examination of the photo and some deductive reasoning. Makes me feel like I'm on an episode of CSI Porland. ;-)

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  4. Let's make this a team effort. I have filled in the blanks in the original post.

    Jen gets credit for Robin's Egg blue paint, although in person its really mint green. Also the Brown-Tan floral wallpaper, which is actually gold in person, and the blue floral stripe.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think we're of kindred spirit. Just found your blog and am anxious to read through it. Looks like you have set the bar HIGH!

    Thanks for stopping by my place and for the kind words.

    Will do some digging at your site tomorrow!

    ReplyDelete