Beneath These Walls

We discovered a few exciting treasures when we pulled down the particleboard paneling in the front rooms. The transom windows were a complete surprise although they really shouldn’t have been since they are common to old farmhouses around here. They were covered from the inside with paneling and from the outside with vinyl siding, and unfortunately the glass had been removed. I love old glass, but sadly this house didn’t come with any…

Original transom frame above a not-so-original door.

Another lovely uncovering was the brick chimney that can be seen from both the living room and the dining room. Unlike the rear chimney, this central chimney was taken down from the roof long ago. It peaks out a bit from some removed plaster in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and that’s the only reason we knew we’d find it downstairs. This chimney is now exposed from the living and dining room, partially exposed in the guest bedroom, and under some old drywall in the main bedroom. Add that to the rear chimney that’s in the kitchen and dressing room, and that’s a lot of gorgeous old brick on display! Which is good. Because it’s my favourite.

Beneath the paneling, we also found five different types of wallpaper. The two patterns we found in the dining room were large floral designs from the 70s or 80s. I think… Dating wallpaper patterns isn’t really a skill I possess.

I thought these patterns from the living room were a bit more charming, especially the colorful floral pattern we found in the closet.
We know the living room closet has been there for a very long time, but it isn’t original to the house. Beneath the frame of the closet on the wall, we found a few pieces of what I think is the original wallpaper. It’s absolutely beautiful. I couldn’t capture this detail well on camera, but the tan swirls that look a bit textured are actually a shimmery gold that looks like it was applied by hand to the paper. I kept as many pieces of this wallpaper as I could, so maybe I can find a pretty way to display it in a frame.

Under one of the transom windows, I found newspaper from 1980s shoved into the frame. This wasn’t very exciting, but it did give us a probable date of when the panelling went up. A more interesting discovery happened in the cellar. Between a crawl space vent and a piece of wood, we found a stack of newspaper ads from the 1960s. Not quite as old as I was hoping to find, but they were still interesting to look through!