Living room: Paint job

As it says in the intro to this album, this is a renovation of the dollhouse kit that my parents gave to me, and that we built, back in the late 1970s. Unbeknownst to me as I grew up and moved away and did the whole Harry Chapin Cats in the Cradle business, they'd kept it long after the last time I worked on it, probably around 1983, through several moves of house and goodness knows how much dust.

Dust is easily cleared away, when one discovers it in the back of their garage in 2011 or so (by which time my daughter and I had already been mini-nuts for years), but water damage from the garage-roof-leak they had a year or two earlier, is a lot trickier. I've already mentioned that trouble a couple of times in this album.

Well, the living room that you see here took the worst of it. It had wallpaper on it originally, and maybe that particular paper held the water to the wood longer than in other rooms, maybe it was because it's on the first floor as is the case in real-life houses... whatever the reason, this room was in terrible shape. The wallpaper, for the most part, would not budge (God bless 1970s glues!), not with heat, certainly not with wet (think of all the wet it had resisted already!), not with chemicals, and not with swearing. I tried it all.

So sanding, peeling the small bits that would cooperate, discovering that in some places that paper might be better than seeing the naked wood for all its water damage... then lots more sanding, LOTS of Kilz to keep the water damage from bleeding back through... which it did, over and over again...

... and when at last it seemed stable, the wall still had wobbles in it that were unavoidable. Hence we've gone with a fantastic mod tone-on-tone stripe here, which at last disguises what effort and prayer couldn't quite confine. The pearly-sheen is picked up more than it looks in real life by the camera, unfortunately—the effect in person is a lovely amber all over (the base coat), and pearly-amber glow on the highlighted stripes.

The stairs, in case you're wondering, took a beating from the water as well. The effect there was the ruining of the (awful, cheap, kit-standard) stair-rail, which I gladly ripped out, but the cementing forever of the stairs themselves. I might have given them an upgrade, but they refused to budge!

I've painted them in a warm cream color on all three floors of the building, and I haven't yet decided, but I may leave them as they are now, without a rail, to give the room a more open feel.

My advice to you: never, ever paint dollhouse stairs in-place. Ugh! What a bear.