The House of My Youth

Part 7 - Wallpaper

We moved into The Old House in January 1963. Aside from it being very different from the "poor house" we had been living in for four months, and from its being "haunted", The Old House had another feature we couldn't help but notice right off: its color scheme.

All of the rooms in the original portion were painted with strange pastel colors. There was no brightness. All of the colors looked like chalk, and not flourescent, either. The primary choice appeared to be this odd green color - which really wasn't too bad.


The room which was difficult to bear was the living room (L). The walls were a very odd dark magenta. The entire room. Twenty-eight feet by sixteen feet of very odd magenta. Mother decided very early that this would not do. This room had to be repainted first.

The problem was, back in 1963, primer paint wasn't all that great. This would prove to be especially important when we began undoing the second odd feature in the room: someone had wallpapered the ceiling.

We didn't notice it at first. I mean, how often does one look at the ceiling anyway? Especially when it's twelve to fifteen feet in the air. But it was wallpapered. We could see the cracks, which meant the papering had been done a good many years earlier. Well, that was easily taken care of. Mother got a ladder and had Mickey begin scraping the ceiling with a spatula. But after he had cleared an area perhaps two feet round she had him stop. The ceiling behind the wallpaper had been painted maroon. I am not joking. Someone, at some point in time, thought it would look just wonderful to paint a large room so it had a maroon ceiling and odd dark magenta walls.

What was troubling Mother was the primer. Would it cover maroon? Well, we now had an exposed face to test it on. So we tested it. Ten times. Same result every time. No. The primer we had would not mask the maroon. The ceiling wallpaper would remain. Fortunately, the spot Mickey had exposed was in the "dark" area of the room, back by the exit door.

We had another problem with the primer. It wasn't all that keen on covering odd dark magenta either. So, we had a new solution to painting: wallpaper. But this presented its own set of problems. Wallpaper was generally quite a bit more expensive than paint. We had just come from an embarassing structure which had demonstrated very adeptly that our family didn't have a lot of money. The only reason we got into The Old House was that nobody else would. But it was off to the paint and wallpaper store in Anoka to see what we could get.

There were many wonderful prints to choose from. We didn't get to choose from those. One look at the price and Mother complained that she couldn't afford to wallpaper a single wall. The clerk gave us a look and brought us to the next lower priced merchandise. Still too pricey. Next. Nope. This continued (I don't remember how long - I was still shy of being seven) until finally, the clerk brought us to a back corner where several large cardboard boxes waited for the garbage man to arrive. Here were several rolls of very cheap and very old wallpaper. We could have as much as we wanted for an incredibly low price. The problem? Finding enough of any pattern to cover a room twenty-eight feet by sixteen feet with a twelve-to-fifteen-foot ceiling.

Now some of the prints weren't half bad. (They were three-quarters bad.) But none of these would even come close to covering the living room. We did keep coming across one particular print: giant leaves tinted in gold on a yellowish-brownish background. I remember Mickey, Lynahr and Judayl laughing at ths pattern. They would only laugh a little while, though. You see, it was the only pattern with enough paper to cover the room. Yes. That is what we got. We took all they had. For all I know they paid us to take it. I know they were laughing at us as we left.

You ever do wallpapering yourself? The old way? I haven't done it since then, so I am only assuming the process is much better refined now. Back then we had to mix the paste ourselves. Then use it up before it dried. Since Helvie and I were so young, we got to squish out the lumps in the paste. Lynahr's job was to measure and cut the paper to size. Gayanne and Judayl applied the past to the paper (fighting the entire time, because Gayanne and Judayl did not like each other much at all), and Mickey and Mother would put it on the walls. Mickey did the high spots, and Mother did the low. Daddy and Ranlen didn't help. Daddy was driving and Ranlen was up north.

We had quite a system, and it worked - in a way. Between the fighting, the spills, the paper which didn't have enough paste falling back down, paper which cracked because it was so old, paper which didn't quite match the rest, the lumps which Helvie and I missed having to be squished after the paper was on the wall, paper put on upside down, and I don't remember what else, we got the job done. In a day. And when we were done, the room actually looked like - crap. But at least it was bright. Sort of.

For some odd reason we felt proud of our achievement. But then, I expect whoever had painted the room way back when had felt proud, too. We didn't know any better. We thought we had done a good job. Eventually, we got all of the paper to stay up. (There were a few repastes.) Heck, the paper helped hold the walls together.

You see, the walls of houses built in the late 1800s did not have sheetrock. I don't know when sheetrock became the norm, but it wasn't when The Old House was constructed. No. The walls of The Old House were made of slats and some kind of plaster. Probably horse hair. Also, the insulation inside was not these neat, pre-measured for width, rolls of pink foam or whatever. I'm not sure what all was used. When the walls began to crack, and pieces began falling away, we found newspapers from the early 1900s, and some kind of itchy, metalic-like shavings. We could hear the shavings fall from upstairs every time someone hit a wall, or jumped on the floor. It sounded like those rainforest canes you can buy in specialty shops. Eventually, it would all pack at the bottom of a wall on the ground floor and bow out the wall until the plaster cracked - spilling the contents out. We would sweep and vacuum it up. No way to replace it. The Old House got colder and colder as time went on. There were places where you see outside when you weren't supposed to. I remember a garden snake using one of those openings to visit. Judayl and Lynahr weren't keen on that at all.

But the paper was an excellent stalwart against the plaster falling away. Despite it being brittle itself, it often lasted well into a wall's bowing. There was the one place, between the two windows on the south side (same wall as the exit door) in which the plaster was bowed out about four to six inches. No lie! It looked like it was pregnant. Except it was near the floor. That may have been the place where Mickey double papered. He had put up a couple of pieces which didn't quite match, and rather than take them down he just covered them up. Mother may have been out of the room at the time. Saved the wall. It lasted until the house burned in '71.

I think The Ghost liked what we did. He was very active in that room anyway. Hmm. Maybe he hated it and was trying to undo it. Maybe, he was the one who painted the room in the first place. We'll never know. When the house went, so did he.