Beautiful Paper

Am I an iconoclast?

I don't automatically subscribe to all the old axioms, like "buy more house that you can afford--you'll grow into it"; or, "you can change the house, but you can't change the neighborhood." Still if there's one adage that probably won't draw my dissent, it's: "buy the cheapest house in the best neighborhood". (Now I might quarrel with how one defines the "best" neighborhood, but....)

Anyhow, I recently had a smart client that did just that. Quarreled with me? No, I meant bought the cheapest house thing. Naturally the house needed a lot of fixin', and amongst the first "demo" casualties were the carpets (covering oak floors), and a pair of enormous, storage closets built for the purposes of converting public areas to bedrooms. In the living room, one of these wall-length monsters blocked windows of slag glass and a fireplace! In the dining room, the closet extraction revealed glimpses of a beautiful early twentieth-century wallpaper (ergo, article A above). Can the paper be preserved? We're unsure. Regrettably, it's already missing in places. However, enough exists that a stencil might be made to match. Stay tuned. (Incidentally, the house was built in 1907. The dining room walls appeared to have first been painted red, then papered.)