Faded Glory Stairway

June 25, 2022

Faded Glory Stairway

Hello again,

Finally...spring is in the air. We are trying to acclimate to Central Illinois at this point. One day we have beautiful sunny warm and the next day cold and windy. OK I guess that sounds like spring everywhere, but when I say warm I mean really warm and when I say cold I mean freezing temps. Although I think we are finally rounding the corner.

While we were enduring several of the "freezing" days in a row I got the wild idea to start peeling wallpaper in the stairwell. This wallpaper had been bothering me since the day we moved in. It was old and faded and was beginning to peel away in almost every corner. I just started pulling on a loose piece down by the dining room and the new project began.

I sincerely didn't know what I was getting into. These walls were plaster and in poor shape. Not to mention that I was making them worse by gouging them up as I tried to scrape off wallpaper. Well we are on a budget so I knew I wasn't going to be able to demo and install drywall or anything crazy like that so I soldiered on. Did I mention that in a stairwell you have extremely tall walls??

Here are some "before" photos:

As you can see the ceiling is also wallpapered. It's kind of hard to see the walls but it's a textured patterned beigey wallpaper. The stairs are painted dark brown and are chipped up and the wood on the landing is worn and ugly. I'm not even going to mention that curtain!

So the next few pictures speak for themselves. We had an ugly mess, but somehow still didn't regret getting rid of the old wallpaper.

After getting the wallpaper off we spent a while scrubbing and patching and trying to get the walls paint-ready. With the nature of the plaster and just the age of the house, we weren't striving for perfection. We were embracing the charm and decided it was perfectly imperfect!

At the top of the stairs there is a little wall that borders the upstairs bathroom. This is the picture below. As you can see, this wall was a disaster. It had previous water damage and we knew it needed more than paint.

Now we finally get to the priming stage, I'm feeling a little better about the progress.

As we got closer to the finish line we decided to look into carpet. I know carpet seems counter-intuitive in a historic home but the stairs themselves were so beat up and ugly that I decided it would be the best choice given the circumstances. With carpet ordered we only needed to finish the trim color. I was super excited about the dark grey/blue we chose for the trim but it was no easy task. Also when we came to finishing we knew we needed to somehow make the transition from the wall to the ceiling smoother because we are keeping the ceiling wallpaper. The original installer overlapped the papers so we ended up using an exacto knife to separate the two and it wasn't pretty. Luckily we have handy Brett, our son-in-law, to help us out with installing a trim piece at the top of the ceilings. Because of all the angles it became a tricky fix so we chose to not highlight that trim with the dark color. I have to admit it does look 100% better though.

The finished product:

In this photo you can see that little wall that was such a disaster, we finished it with a piece of bead board and it looks like it should have always been there!