Started on the dining room

I started on the Dining room today.  First one piece of good news – the old Lincrusta (or Anaglypta) came off in one single piece – it was really hardly attached to the wall at all.  Behind it, the wall is real original lime plaster which obviously had been damp at some time in the historic past but no longer is.  I also managed to get the exact match for it in a “Superglypta” so I can do just the affected wall and then repaint rather than having to repaper everywhere.

The less good news is that I roughly sanded a bit of the woodwork and applied oil based gel stain to it.  Basically a tiny area took me an hour and still looks shite – the wood is too badly damaged for any resanding/staining job that I could do.  So falling back to plan 2 – I will paint the woodwork instead.  Actually for a house of this type, paint would very probably have been the original wall covering which was removed to carry out the botched staining job.

Regardless, something has to be done because some of the wood is essentially bare at the moment and is very dry.  If paint won’t give a reasonable effect I will have to hand it over to a professional, but I really don’t want to pay £5000 for this.  J does not like the idea of paint but has reluctantly agreed.  R is away in London at the moment but I can pretty much guarantee he won’t care either way.