The summer of working...well playing at the Library came to an end when school started. I still had the job at the Library but now the playing was going to have to stop. Somehow I was going to have to become more of a Library Director and less of a Pied Piper of children. Then there was the little matter of the Christmas House Tour only three months away. Procrastination was going to have to stop.
The chances were not good that hundreds of rolls of wallpaper and a truck load of paint was magically going to appear on the walls and woodwork no matter how hard I wiggled my nose like Samantha on Bewitched. In addition I was going to have to spend some time with wallpaper books and try to decided what I was even going to do.
Since I had started upstairs then the best thing would be to finish the master bedroom and the adjoining room we called the dressing room. I decided to go with navy blue and yellow mainly because I found a wallpaper that jumped off the page at me. All of the walls, even the closets, had wallpaper. New rule: if there is one layer of wallpaper that has successfully stayed on the walls for forty years - go over it. If in doubt put a coat of Kilz over the existing wallpaper to make sure it is firmly attached to the wall and to keep the color from coming through. Then paint all the woodwork, the old wooden blinds and the furniture with oil paint which tales a long time to dry between coats. That pretty well ate up the month of September and part of October.
In the meantime besides actually appearing at work on a fairly regular basis there was the carnival that needed to be planned at school to begin raising money for playground equipment. No one, including me, seemed to know much about school carnivals and our expertise came from what everyone remembered from their childhood. With no money to purchase anything all the games and prizes were donated by the parents. There were twelve parents involved and everyone came up with a game or a booth, built it, made up rules and got little prizes of some kind. Most of the prizes were handmade or baked goodies that the kids loved. That made it fun for not only the kids but all the parents who helped. The carnival was just before Halloween and we included a costume contest.
My thought of stripping all the woodwork downstairs disappeared when I attempted to strip some louvered doors. That thought did not last very long. The doors went to a vat stripper and everything else sadly had to be painted. Many years and layers of oil paint would have been an endless year project. So I decided to do the dining room next.
A Saturday afternoon at the paint and wall paper store turned expensive as I not only fell in love with a wallpaper but fabric to match and oil paint for the woodwork and blinds. With the tour timeclock ticking off the minutes speed was of the utmost necessity and I became a Librarian by day and a wall paperer, painter and lambrequin maker by night. Good thing I learned to nap when no one was at the Library and open my eyes quickly when the door opened and someone came in. Perhaps I did not always appear too alert but I did manage to get the dining room done by the first week in November.
Now the kitchen was a problem. The floor was covered in a dark green linoleum with a black border and a gold star in the very center. I figured the floor had been there for probably forty years and no amount of Mop & Glo made it look any brighter. A new sheet vinyl floor was the current rage but according to Harry, my resident plumber, heater and radiator caretaker, I was going to need a new subfloor and have the radiators raised. Sounded serious but Harry knew best and was willing to do it. I was also in luck here as the floor we had picked out for the house in Kansas was just the color and pattern that would be right for the kitchen which saved hours searching for that.
But before I could start anything I needed to solve a major problem. The plaster ceiling in the kitchen was sagging. Everyone said "Oh, don't worry about that. They all do that." Actually I did notice several sagging ceiling in some other homes but I couldn't see not fixing it. What if the whole thing crashed down on the breakfast table one morning or worse - in the middle of the house tour. Was there a plaster master around? Not that I could find. Did I want to How to plaster? Well maybe but not in the amount of time I had. So what to do. Just by a stroke of luck I was one of the very first to have a subscription to The Old House Journal. Back in their beginning, before they had paid advertising and looked more like a newspaper it gave very good do-it-yourself instructions on restoring old houses. Somewhere in one of the issues I found an article about tin ceilings.
There was a company in Brooklyn, New York that was still manufacturing the tin ceilings. They had all the original dies plus some new ones. It sounded quite simple to install and at that time they cost about $19.00 a piece for a 2' x 4' sheet. The bad part was that for crating and shipping it would cost almost as much as the panels themselves. So we went the cheaper route and drove to Brooklyn to pick them up. It so happened that the company was only a few blocks from Coney Island and the Beach. When we took the time to walk along the Boardwalk in search of something to eat we discovered that it was entirely settled by Russians and all the restaurants were of Russian cuisine and alcohol.
It was quite an adventure for Wes and Wally as when we picked a place to eat where we had to point at the food in the Deli case as no one spoke English. They thought it really fun but I did notice that we got quite a few stares during lunch.
So, Harry came and put my new subfloor, raised two radiators and installed the new vinyl. I got the paint and the wallpaper done so it was time to install the ceiling. Funny that the day Dennis decided to do it was Thanksgiving and I still think we ate a lot of plaster dust that came from installing the 1"x 2" furring strips the ceiling was nailed to. Oh well, guess it did not kill us and after two coats of polyurethane the ceiling was beautiful. It was now just two weeks away from the tour and the powder room, front hall and the living room were not done. My playing/working all summer was no excuse for my severe procrastination. No need to cry over things I could not get done, just try to make it as good looking as possible. After all just because I could not stand dead wedge wood blue maybe others would love it. So I picked out paper for the powder room and got the paint done while I waited and waited and waited for the paper.
I still can't decide if it was a good thing or not that the paper arrived on Friday afternoon the day before the house tour or that Harry had noticed the windows we did not know what to do with in the basement while he was working in the
kitchen. They were actually the storm windows. Dennis had said he certainly could not put the upstairs ones up so a good sized teenage boy in town agreed to put them up, of course, on the morning of the house tour. Great. I spent the night in the basement washing years of dirt off of twenty-three storm windows. Fun.
After breakfast I sent the boys off to play with friends for the day and Dennis went out to put the storm windows up downstairs. The boy came and got the windows upstairs installed. Guess you have to have experience in that sort of thing. Dennis had said he was not getting up on a ladder to do the upstairs. When the kid came by to do the windows he had them done in thirty minutes not even using a ladder. He opened the window, removed the screen, pulled it inside and put the storm window out, attached it and it was done. Duh...guess you learn something new everyday.
By noon the commotion had stopped enough that it was time to wallpaper the bathroom. Sis came over to do all the decorations and noticed that I still needed to vacuum and the next thing I realize is that several ladies showed up to vacuum and do the final cleaning. Another lady showed up with a pot of homemade soup and rolls for dinner since there was going to be no dinner cooked in that kitchen that evening. I finished the wallpaper about four, got cleaned up my self, fed Dennis and the boys the soup, sent them off to the movies and was ready for the tourists on the stroke of five.
My thoughts on a house tour are that the visitors like to see the owner of the house and all of the house, not just a couple of rooms. I also hate it when they put ropes across doorways so you can only glance at a room. I worked to have the whole house visible even if the traffic flow up and down the stairs was a little tight. I literally propped myself up (I was ready to collapse from exhaustion) in the kitchen against the sink and happily greeted 1,000 people between five and ten o"clock that night. Sis had done a beautiful job with decorating every inch of the house with fresh pine and holly from the trees in my yard and it was beautiful. Plus the tin ceiling was a big hit and I was glad I was there to tell how it came about.
All in all I have to say that it was fun and the whole tour of six homes plus the Porch Club and the Episcopal Church was a huge success. In the end I was fine with what all I had gotten done in the house especially since there were those who loved the Wedge Wood Blue. Would I do it again...of course.*
Now what to do about Christmas. It was the 11th of December and I had not given Christmas a second thought.
*Our last two homes have been "on tour" everyday. Guess I got into the tour thing.
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