Rosy Cheeks & Butterfly Wings

When we first moved into This Old Purple House, we set our kids up sleeping in the bunk room. Our furniture was not to arrive for a couple of weeks, so it made sense to put them in there, where the built-ins would make it feel a little less like camping for them. Plus, it was close to the only reliably working bathroom in the house.

The (hyped) excitement about the new house, though, was that our twins would, for the first time, have their own rooms. So, once Clem the Plumber and Kenny the Electrician were set to their tasks replacing the major systems in TOPH (more on this later) and the sump was hard at work on the primordial ooze in the pool, I was left with no choice but to actually deliver on two finished rooms. Sigh.

I started with my daughter's room since it was the least intimidating -- an all-cosmetic job. I spent hours in the wee hours of several prior mornings online in the dark reading horror stories about the removal of old wall paper from plaster walls, so I was prepared for the worst. And then it peeled right off. In large sheets.

As it turned out, the impossibly-original plaster walls behind the 1960s strawberry-fields-through-a-kaleidoscope wallpaper were crazed with an intricate and complete system of hairline cracks that allowed the walls to "breath." The hot air of summer, the cold air of winter, the dust of autumn and the damp of spring over 60+ years had turn-turn-turned the wallpaper paste into a thin, brittle layer that mostly came off with the paper. Nice.

So, this was not going to be your typical spackle-and-sand, baby-smooth scenario. Any pressing pressure on the walls caused alarming shifts in the network of cracks. Sanding was definitely out. But, as a mother, I owed it to my daughter to stem the drafts that clearly permeated every surface of her room-to-be. And, as an antique homeowner, hoped to find some way to stabilize the potentially-crumbling walls without resorting to the wallpaper-as-Band-aid approach. So I bought 3 quarts of DAP Fast N Final Interior and Exterior Spackling and a very wide blade. Time will tell, but this product (consistency of super-lite meringue with a bit of chalk dust in it), filled and spread perfectly. I also used DAP ALEX Caulk with Silicone to run a finger bead into the gaping cracks at the corners of the room and window trim. The theory there was to, again, block the drafts, but also allow the walls to move with the house. Time will tell on that one too.

The texture of the walls was still akin to that of aging Mexican stucco, but there are people in the world (somewhere) who pay BIG bucks to faux-finishers for just that effect. So I decided to embrace it. However, my daughter had chosen a coolish shade of lightish pink for her room. Looking at the swatch and looking at her "authentic" walls, I had to beg to differ. So I visited our local Benjamin Moore store to look for alternatives. And right there on the mis-mixed $10/gallon rack was this gorgeous, warm melon color. And right there next to it was a can of butter-yellow porch and floor paint. It was meant to be. Paired with a nice warm, matte, hides-everything linen white on the walls, it was perfect!

After a generous roll-slathering of a non-low-VOC, oil-based primer (forgotten the name, but it's a brand now owned by Benjamin Moore, not Zinnser or Kilz) with the consistency of Elmer's Glue, the web cracks and crazing disappeared. (My apologies to my chemical-free friends, but sometimes you've got to bring out the big guns. You know you use chlorine bleach when all else fails.) Only the gentle hills and valleys of the walls remained, along with the "layered look" of past patch jobs around the windows remained. The one truly smooth and flat area was where a fireplace was professionally concealed sometime in the last century. If you squint, you can see the outline. Charming and mysterious, I think.

When I finally began to paint (waited 8 days of room-closed, windows-open, and fan-on for the primer to finish its off-gassing), the color choices came alive. No second guessing here.

Then my daughter peaked in. "Mommy, that is NOT lightish pink."

Think fast, think fast, think fast.

"You know what? This color is EXACTLY the color of your rosy cheeks," I said convincingly. "When I saw it, I knew it belonged in your room."

"Really?" She grinned encouragingly, trying to picture her own cheeks without the benefit of a mirror.

And I, feeling encouraged, added, "And the floor is going to be exactly the color of butterfly wings. Remember the ones that used to flutter by in our garden in Annapolis?"

"Perfect!" She was beaming and gazing around the room that was to be all her own.

Perfect.