Embracing the Cracks....or What Was I Thinking???

I started stripping wallpaper in my dining room this week.

What was I thinking??!!



I have talked myself into leaving the wallpaper in the dining room for the past 20 years for a couple reasons.


I thought it added an old world charm, enhancing the age and style of my home. It may even be original from my 1870 Victorian, but it was most likely added in the 1960's.



It matched my madeover furniture I brought from my farmhouse perfectly. The color of my huge cupboard and rocking chair is called Buckwheat. I painted all the trim the same color.

I was okay with it also because being an old home, I knew that the walls are plaster and lathe and that there is a really good chance that there were many cracks and imperfections in them. It has proven true in other parts of the home that we have redone.


That was all good and well until I went to my Pastor's home for a ladies' bible study. Our Pastor's wife Kathleen went to school for design and I have always loved her style. She has done a wonderful job styling their new home with every single element I love and have seen on HGTV!

Our tastes are similar except for one thing. Where I use color and wallpaper, she used a backdrop of plain grey walls. All of her décor just popped! Industrial and primitive mixed in with modern worked so well.


I have been incorporating a lot of  industrial and primitive items into my dining room décor but they seemed to have gotten lost in the busyness of the wallpaper.

When I got home from her house I went into the dining room and started ripping the wallpaper off in an area I knew was loose....I really did! I have left the remnants there as a reminder that I was really going to do this.



Should I even go into the fact that there are two other projects that I was definitely getting to this winter? I still have the paint swatches hanging from the door frame in my linen closet area. The wallpaper has to be stripped from there too and it should be a fairly easy and quick job. But still it is waiting.

My front foyer floor and stairs are hardwood and a hot mess. This house used to have two apartments upstairs so it was the main entrance for those and the main house. After I saw Tuula's makeover over at Thrifty Rebel Vintage,  I was determined to pretty mine up too. Still it sits waiting. That would be a significantly harder job!

I think it comes down to how sick you are of looking at the stuff that needs fixing. I am pretty sick of looking at my front hall entrance, I am still okay with the linen closet area, but the dining room? I was more than over looking at that wallpaper.


Can I say I might be regretting it now?


It is too late to turn back. Major cracks.

And did I mention yet that the wallpaper is not cooperating on coming off? It is GLUED on pretty good.


I am now thinking of how I might be able to embrace the cracks. You know, make them part of the design and décor? My vision is to paint the walls a neutral linen color so that all my stuff shows much better.


I have visions of those ancient walls you see in Italian villas or castles in Ireland.


Yeah, probably not.


Our handyman Jim is coming over this weekend to fix our kitchen faucet. I may have to ambush him and negotiate a job.


The dining room!


Stay tuned!


AnnMarie xoxo

I am linking up with these great blog parties:

Thoughts of Home on Thursday
Vintage Charm Party
Share Your Cup Thursday
Home Sweet Home
Best of the Weekend


Random Things

Just some random interesting things that happened this past weekend, with pictures. I finally have learned to take my camera wherever I go in case there's a blog post in it!

My husband's company participates in offering it's employees free days at different places throughout the area. The place for August is the Rochester Museum and Science Center on East Avenue in the city of Rochester. It is a beautiful area of the city. My husband loves going to that area because it reminds him of the "good" parts of New York City, where he grew up. I have lived in the area all my life and can't say that I visit these places very often. We decided to go on Saturday.

The first "scientific" thing you encounter when you arrive to the museum is the Whisper Dish.
This is how far the two dishes are from each other.....

 

My husband could not believe that it really worked until he and my son tried it out. He got a kick out of it.....

 

There's my son way down there, whispering....

After a few hours at the museum we decided to hang around the city more to partake in the "culture" and stay there for dinner. We were meeting our friends Karl and Diane at a restaurant located in the High Falls district of the city, on Brown's Race, where Rochester's early industrial development took place.

The restaurant is called La Luna and boasts about it's fantastic view of the falls while sitting on the deck to eat. Sounds romantic right?

Do you see any Falls? Nope, there aren't any in view. They are way far to the right around the bend and we never did see them. We could hear them though.

It is a pretty view though,  surrounded by historic warehouses and huge water powered wheels. Rochester was once known as the Flour City and now is known as the Flower City because it hosts the Lilac Festival every year.

Here is a cool, huge wheel and the walls surrounding it.....

 

 We never did eat at that restaurant. It ended up being too pricey and so we decided to find somewhere more suited to our budgets!

We did walk around the area though before leaving. The city had renovated a lot of it to make it THE place to go to walk around and eat in one of the many restaurants.

As we were gazing out over the landscape, there, near the woods, was a family of deer. We could see the rack on the male, then the mother and then the babies. They were heading toward the water for a drink. Very cool, being that we were in the middle of a city. You can just see them on both sides of the white pole.

We ended up at Hogan's Hideaway on Park Ave., another cultural, cool place of the city, for dinner and sat out on the deck with the bees.

You never know what you will encounter when venturing off to the city. Walking our food off just a block from the restaurant and we were encountered by a very inebriated man and a good Samaritan who was trying to keep him from walking into traffic and to help him find his way home.

We walked by a brightly lit room, decorated in bright colors and fabrics with a Buddha statue at the far end. There was music and chanting going on. We whispered as we went by.

We always have a great time hanging out with Karl and Diane. This was an especially memorable one.

What interesting thing did you do this weekend?

AnnMarie :)

Linking up with these great parties:

Monday Mingling Blog Hop
Amaze Me Monday
You're Gonna Love It
Tuesday Trivia
Nifty Thrifty Tuesday
What's It Wednesday
Thursday Favorite Things Blog Hop
Freedom Fridays