The before image I stole from the pictures I had saved from the house sale ad, so the interior is from the previous owner, and the after is the current state of our library. It's still a work in progress but we made a huge leap towards the dream moody library we want.
Painting the library walls was no easy feat as we had to painstakingly remove the old vinyl wallpaper first before we could paint it with a dreamy muted green chalk paint. We could have just painted over the wallpaper, if it didn't have texture, and I definitely did not want to see lines through the paint. People, please don't use vinyl wallpaper, it's hell to remove if you ever want to get rid of it. First you have to rip off the upper layer that is vinyl, then wet the backing that will still be left on the wall, and hopefully get that soggy paper off in big pieces. It took us two full days to get the wallpaper off and do all the other preparations before we could start painting.
While we did the removal process, I did some archeology too. There is a sort of arch between the livingroom and library, and the previous owners had left the original wallpaper(s) and paper backing underneith the new wallpaper on that part, everywhere else it's removed and replaced with drywall. What we found under the fugly plastic made me want to cry, it was so beautiful and tragic.
It should be a cardinal sin to cover wallpaper this gorgeous, especially with vinyl. Who could ever want to get rid of this ornamental green and gold design!? I managed to cut out a big piece of the wallpaper above the arch, all the layers together and remove the modern ugly wallpaper to reveal a good piece of the beautiful history. I'm going to find a nice gold frame to showcase the old wallpaper and make sure we save that piece of history. Maybe at some point I'll try and find something similar to put in another room.
Once we had done all the prep work, it was almost midnight on day two but we already wanted to put down the primer paint. We also did some test paints on the wall to see in the morning what combination would look the best.
Actually they all looked like shit to be honest, all too chalky looking for some reason but the images online of that paint looked all amazing. I decided to risk it all and just went with the green grey and see what happens. I did two thin layers, first looked horrid, that's fine, second, not that much better yet, but after the man did the third layer the final colour and finish started to reveal itself and looked very promising.
By the way, I have never done any renovations in my life, so I'm just winging it. I am great at getting ideas and starting new projects right away, but I need my man to reel it in and make sure my ideas can actually be achieved and are within money, our know-how and time limits.
This project took us three full days and was 100% worth it, but we will have to come up with a different game plan for the livingroom walls when we eventually get to them because it's quite a few square metres more than the library.