Brilliant

This month my friends and I have been doing "Thirty Days of Thankful", but instead of giving thanks for what we consider the big things, like family and faith and good friends and such, we've been giving thanks for ordinary things that we tend to take for granted.  Hence, my list has things on it like furnaces and internet access and replacement window glass.  (For real, glass is on my list.)  And really, the fact that we take those things for granted is, in itself, something to be grateful for when much of the rest of the world doesn't have regular access to them.

Anyhow, today I'm thankful for one of the things that ought to be on my list but isn't:  beadboard wallpaper.   Yup.  Wallpaper that looks surprisingly like the real thing.  It's brilliant.  Of course it costs less than the real thing (about $25 or so for a roll), and it's so much easier to put up than beadboard.  Even easier than those big sheets of what Mare calls beadboard plywood.  He's a restoration purist and won't call that stuff beadboard.  He'd have apoplexy over this.

I looked at a couple of different brands of it, and what I recommend is the allen + roth brand that's sold at Lowe's.  It's fairly thick and seems more durable than the other brands.  It also looks more like the real stuff than some of the other brands.  The walls in my bathroom were a mess.  Some previous owner had used vinyl flooring as wainscoting.  Ick.  When I took off that ugliness, the walls underneath were drywall that had never been taped and mudded.  I'm not sure exactly what happened in this room, because the top third or so of the walls seems to be plaster, but everything below that is drywall.  If you look closely at the photo, you can see the horizontal line under the wallpaper where plaster meets drywall.  Baffling.  The beadboard wallpaper is thick enough to cover most of that mess.  I'm seriously thinking about covering the yucky paneling in my laundry room with beadboard wallpaper.

But first, I have to finish this room.  The wallpaper isn't painted yet (it comes bright white like that, and it looks nice enough that you really could leave it that way) and I need to put up some chair rail too.  Then I need to finish painting the ceiling (which is also wallpapered, with stuff that looks a bit like tin ceiling) and put in the new vanity and hang the towel rod back up.  Oh yeah, and I need to finish that stenciled floor.  Still tapping away at that...