What's Under That? Dining Room Walls Edition

Just because I haven't been posting, it doesn't mean that no work has been getting done. In fact, it's finally warming up a bit here in Michigan, so we can open up the windows and finally get the farmhouse cleaned up!

One project that's been ongoing for quite awhile has been the back wall of the dining room. When we bought the house, that wall had some faux brick right behind the wood burner, with wood paneling on either side. The wood paneling could have been worse, but still.

The paneling in question is over on the left, popping up behind the wood burner.

It was, apparently, so nondescript that we didn't even get a good "before" picture. Alas. But then one day, Chris asked The Question... "should we see what's under that?"

Good question. The answer? Kind of a hot mess, actually.

Here's what you're seeing. The brown dots are leftover adhesive that was doing a no-longer-especially-good job of holding on the paneling. The yellow is a skim coat of plaster that had been put on over two layers of wallpaper (the main layer is the kind of blue-gray color) because apparently plastering over wallpaper is a thing?

Also, while we're talking about the dining room, let's take a moment to remember the weird partial wall between the dining room and the kitchen. That bit in the middle by the step-stool is a closet, and above it is the chimney that's getting removed eventually.

Even more paneling. How lovely.

There were two main jobs here: popping the paneling off the divider walls, and scraping the plaster off the wallpaper (and, as a related job, removing whatever wallpaper got left behind). One of these was significantly easier than the other.

Almost one big room!

If you guessed the paneling was the easy one, you're absolutely right. The plaster scraping was tedious. One the right side of the wood burner, at least some of it came down fairly easily; on the left, that stuff did not want to go.

In the end, we finally got it scraped away, and these warmer days have made it possible to goo up the walls with some wallpaper remover to strip off the final remaining layers of paper and paste, so we're finally just left with the plaster.

Ta-da!

You can see what we think might be the shadow of an old picture rail there at the top, and hopefully when we get things all squared away with the walls, there will be one again. Due to the paneling, the baseboard is missing on this wall, so that will need to be replaced, too. But for now, we have at least one clean slate to work with!

And, because I really did like it, one final salute to the original wallpaper from that wall.