The Parlor Gives Me Fits

My mama gave me an early birthday present, a picture for my dining room.  She's really good at choosing pictures.  I'd still be standing there in the shop trying to make up my mind.

The dining room and the kitchen are the only two rooms that look like they're part of a house rather than a construction zone or a burglary scene.  Sigh...but I'm gaining on it.  Unless something extraordinary or terrible happens on my days off, I should finish papering the foyer this week.

And then I can start in on the front parlor.  The front parlor gives me fits.  Already.  First off, there's all that painted-over wallpaper to steam off.  Then there's the places in the wall where I think the wallpaper might be the only thing holding the plaster together.  Then there are the four front windows with all those little muntins that will have to be painted.  And the electrical wire poking out of the ceiling.  I still have to pry up about 8 feet of tack strip from around the room.  Someone (i.e., White Trash Bob) will have to help me hang the picture rail.  All the trim needs to be painted. 

And then...and then...after all that's done, I have to hang two kinds of wallpaper.

This is the paper that I like but don't love, which will go from the baseboard to the picture rail:

It's nice paper.  The flowers in it match the flowers on the paper in the foyer, and they pick up the colors in the stained glass windows, and the paper looks nice with the paper in the dining room, and it's not too dark or too light, and it kinda looks like the paper from the 1930s or 1940s that's in there now only painted over, and when I finally buy living room furniture almost anything will go with it.  But I don't love it.  Yet.

And this is the paper I bought for above the picture rail:

This paper I love.  It makes me swoon.  The pattern is really small, about an inch or so, and it reminds me of the paper that's inside an old trunk my grandma had.  It also reminds me a lot of the pattern on the etched glass in my front door, and so I briefly considered using it in the foyer, but I didn't like the idea of yellow house, yellow foyer.  So up high in the front parlor it goes.  The space above the picture rail is only 18 inches high, so I needed a small print there.  Love it.  Did I mention that already?

Between now and the hanging of that paper is a lot of aggravation.  Thinking about it makes my eye twitch.  I estimate five sets of days off (17 days total) and at least that many Woodchucks (both Pear and Granny Smith flavor) before the paper hanging begins.  Egads.