The Saga of the Dining Room Wall

When we moved into our house, the dining room, which is quite nice with chair rail and crown molding was also very "Ew" with some dark blue wallpaper with little flowers. It coordinated perfectly with the blue ducky wallpaper and border in the kitchen. I wish I had better "before" pictures, but this is what I've come up with from the real estate listing photos. Before:



I decided to start ripping off the wallpaper one day. Great idea right! That's not what J.May said when I enlisted him to help. After removing the wallpaper laboriously, and beginning to Kilz the wall underneath, I discovered that there was yet another layer of wallpaper under some paint on the wall. The Kilz caused it to all start peeling off, so we started scraping, yet again. Here is the wall in the middle of the second scraping session. The green color is original wall color beneath layers and layer of paint and teacup wallpaper.



Finally we got through all this nonsense, and painted the wall some basic, albeit temporary colors. We knew the wall was a little messed up after all the wallpaper layers, scraping, etc, and that we would need to do additional work on the wall before it could be "finished" but I painted it anyway in between so our house didn't look a like a constant construction zone.



I'm sure you're thinking, (or at least I am right now) "Wow, that's looks great!" Which it did from a distance, but if you got very close to the wall, you could easily see the bumps, texture inconsistencies, gouges, etc on the wall. This was only temporary. I decided I really wanted to just finish this room, and thanks to my friend Diana, she gave me a gallon of Valspar "Venetian Plaster" tinted Caramello. I've never used this stuff before, but I'm adventurous, so I started slapping on some pumpkin colored plaster on the top half of the wall. This was pretty risky, and I was scared when at first, it looked like this. Again, the picture is sideways, but it looked just like baby poop. Hmm, what have I done???



But despite my fears, the finished product turned out amazing (sans on last coat of chocolate glaze on the bottom half). The Venetian plaster turned out to be a great medium to work with, although it took me a while to get the hang of it, and it is rather labor intensive. It smoothed out all the bumps and inconsistencies in the wall, and leaves a textured appearance, that masks any remaining bumps.





I started my Venetian plaster project using a trowel like this, because that's what they told me to get at Lowes, but I found that I was putting A LOT of plaster on the walls, and wasn't getting a very smooth finish. Bummer. I paid $11 for this trowel.



I ended up using something more like this that I already has laying around the house, and got much better results. Maybe I'm not that professional at plastering, but this tool enable a much thinner, smoother plaster application for me.



Many sites recommended sanding or buffing the final coat of plaster to get a shiny finish. I tried that a little bit, but it was SOOOO shiny, and SOOO much work. I hightailed it to Home Depot, and picked up a quart of Behr's Venetian Plaster Clear Topcoat number 775 Satin. This stuff is applied to an unsanded coat of plaster with the same trowel you used for the plaster. It dries with a Satin sheen, not too shiny, but finished looking. Mas bueno.