moar hoam improovmint

[hudebnik]

When we moved into our current house in December 2001, the main floor (including the kitchen) was wallpapered and wall-to-wall-carpeted, the quasi-finished attic was paneled in brown, and the second bedroom was paneled in light blue. We started ripping down the main-floor wallpaper and the day we closed on the mortgage, and finished ripping it down and painting the living/dining room a few weeks later, then (once the paint-dripping was done) ripped up the wall-to-wall carpeting and refinished the floor.

We ripped down the attic paneling, patched the holes this left in the plaster, and painted in 2010 and 2011.

We had professionals demolish and renovate the bathroom in 2015.

We had professionals demolish and renovate the kitchen in 2017.

We ripped down some of the paneling from the office in 2019 in preparation for having professionals replace the windows. But it's been sitting for the past year with one wall de-paneled, with glue streaks and gaping holes in the plaster, which still has its mid-20th-century blue paint job. So yesterday we ripped down two more walls' worth of paneling, and discovered this:



One of the walls is wallpapered: ships in bottles, sextants, telescopes, ships in frames with date captions, naval flags, etc. The wallpaper isn't to our taste, and it's in sufficiently poor condition that we couldn't very well keep it if it were, but now shalmestere is thinking an "accent wall" with some kind of wallpaper might be a nice touch, once we're done repairing plaster.

And what's with this?

The ship-in-a-frame with the 1593 date caption has clinker sides, a dragon prow, and a single square sail. Was anybody still building ships that way in 1593? Or is this a ship they dug up in 1593?

Comments

[cellio]

Wall-to-wall carpeting in a *kitchen*? This was done by people who never actually used the kitchen to cook, I take it?

[hudebnik]

No, I don't think there was carpeting in the kitchen -- that misleading wording came from a couple of rounds of editing -- but there was definitely flowery wallpaper. There was W2W carpeting in the living/dining room (which segue into one another, with a passageway behind them to the kitchen, exactly as in Archie Bunker's house).