apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

After some years my parents painted their home... and i came across some pieces of wall paper which reminded me my very chilhood... those dark and terrible papers on the walls....

We are redoing our finished basement and we too had that same dark green color on the walls and floor.

My mother got new wood floors in her house last week and when we took up the old carpet we found our names written on the floor from 1992.

Last year my boyfriend and I rennovated his room in his old townhouse apartment. When we peeled off the wallpaper that had been painted over (and was peeling off the walls so badly that we pulled it off with our hands) we found a gorgeous cranberry red painted directly onto the plaster--it must have been 100 years old. I never would have guessed that his dingy apartment started out so beautiful!

We are sanding old paint in preparation for a new paint job in our 1962 house and discovered the entryway was once painted in the exact color we decided to paint it - a dark orange! My husband had noticed in research that all the houses of this era seemed to have at least one room in orange, so we chose orange for the entryway (which is currently a dark pink.) Apparently, it was the right choice!

When removing wallpaper in my last apartment (in a house in Potsdam, Germany), I found three layers of hideous floral patterns and finally, on the wall, patches of old newspaper in Gothic print from 1912.
Before wallpapering again, we wrote our names and the dates on the wall with permanent marker, in German, English and Chinese, and I hope someone finds it some day :o)

Whenever I redo a room, I always like to leave a bit of the old room left. Whether it's a portion of the previous wall color, or leaving the interior of a closet door left unpainted. I do it not only to remind myself what it looked like but also as a way of telling myself that there is still a lot of work to be done, a room is never truly finished and I need to come back.

We found that same green, as well as fire engine red and lavender under the white in our veranda.

I wonder if that was some kind of prep coat put on real plaster in days gone by. I have genuine plaster (not dry wall) and I've found that green in any number of places also

I've got 8-12 layers of paint in my house... one of them is teal - which was used on all the wood throughout the house!

In the process of opening up a covered over window in the dining room of my 100 year-old house, I've unveiled a stencil painted bouquet of red roses with a pink ribbon and lots of really ugly mud colored gypboard and plaster from years of re-do's.

In my childhood home which was built in the early to mid 1960's, we discovered one bedroom downstairs had been painted several colors, including pink, light green, a light blue and of course, white and I went with an ice blue, essentially a white with a touch of blue like that of a thick layer of ice that has a bluish tint to it. I think my sister went with a light green, the back downstairs bedroom 2 of my other sisters had painted a bright somewhat intense yellow that caught the early morning sun from it's high clearstory east facing window and it was like having the sunshine in the room itself. A fond memory from growing up. :-)

We only knew of some of the former colors due to the spatters found on the rubber baseboard molding.

When the bathroom in my 100-year-old apartment was gutted in fall 2006, the layers of paint were like tree rings: dark green, pink, and that 1950s putty color you don't see anymore, among others.

The clawfoot tub in my previous apartment provided evidence of past baby blue and pink bathroom incarnations as whoever had painted each subsequent layer had not made the effort to really get behind the tub. In that same apartment, the landlady had painted over wallpaper, so any hole made in the walls revealed layers of nasty vintage wallpaper. I always find that stuff endlessly fascinating!

btw, the woodwork in your home looks stunning! Color me green with envy!

Archaeological spelunking is the best thing ever. My ex-landlady actually held off patching up a hole in the wall from a repair in her 1928 house so I could stick my arm in and see what interesting wall coverings I could pull out.

Our entire house was originally done in hospital-grade mint green... applied directly to the drywall, which we luckily discovered before we started to redecorate! Oh, and there was also the window trim in one of the bedrooms - for some reason it was mustard yellow and the previous owners had left us a turquoise Roman blind to match. Hideous!