Okay, they’re not hallways exactly, but the Queen Anne Rowhouse has two rooms that are dominated by stairs. If I’d built this house myself I would have left out the wall between the “stair room” and the “bay window room” on one or both floors. But it came with walls snugly in, so I decided to suck up the fact that 20% of my usable space would basically be glorified hallways.

Back in February, my dad helped me build two crazy staircases that would work in these rooms. (It was no small undertaking!). Since then I’ve been slowly finishing the rooms, but I was held up by some electricity and wallpaper logistics. In particular, I wanted the wall that the stairs go up against to have one continuous piece of paper without any trim or gaps in it, just like in a real house. My first attempt was thwarted when I underestimated how visible the wire running down from the attic would be under the paper. Dissatisfied, I ripped it out, added a piece of stiff paper upstairs to cover the wire, and tried again. This time I had trouble gluing the very inside corner because my stiff paper didn’t go all the way to the corner and this prevented me from getting a nice clean seam. In attempting to fix it, I made a huge mess and ultimately ripped out the paper in disgust.

I didn’t take pictures of either attempts because I thought – hey, what could go wrong?! Here’s what I was left with after Strike Two.

After the second mishap, I thought for a few days about how to proceed. Luckily I hadn’t damaged any of the paper on the adjoining wall (yet!), because I already attached a light to that wall and the wires are covered up with wallpaper and flooring on the other side. In other words, repapering the adjoining wall would be a no-go. At this point I felt like I only had one more try to get it right.

Instead of gluing the stiff paper to the wall this time, I cut my wallpaper and then glued it to the back of the paper instead. This way I was able to get the edges matched up perfectly. (For the bottom half, the fit of the stairs was too snug with stiff paper added, so I only did this on the top. Downstairs the offending wire is covered up by the staircase, anyway.)

It worked! There are a few glue smudges and wrinkles, but I think once the stairs will be in place they won’t be obvious. The side edge isn’t straight but with the hinged panel attached you won’t be able to see that.

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Moving right along with the rowhouse living room and office. Here’s the French door downstairs. For the headers, I haven’t been too careful about making sure they’re consistently wide. This one’s almost too short… I glued the door in before I cut it, so just had to wing it. In retrospect I probably should have made it a tad wider. Oh well.

Here’s the second door in the office, which leads into the bedroom.

And here’s the open doorway in the living room, that leads into the kitchen. Originally this had an arched top but I filled it in with foamcore. This one’s a bit too wide, I should have cut it down but I didn’t realize until after I’d already glued the cove molding onto the top. So I left it. Hopefully I’m my own worst critic on this and no one else will notice. (Or if they do, they’ll be too polite to mention it.)

Started adding baseboards and chair rail. Also, in this picture you can see how I trimmed the inside of the kitchen doorway using thin basswood.

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I’m running out of creative titles for these blog posts. This one is (mostly) about wallpapering / flooring / trim in the living room and office, which are the two rooms with bay windows. Hence the mildly clever title. You’ve been warned.

Okay, living room first. I didn’t like the arched doorway cut into the wall leading into the kitchen. This is a hand-made house, and the arch wasn’t even, and there was no way I’d find trim that would fit this door. Making arched trim for an arch I wasn’t crazy about seemed like a huge and unnecessary time suck. So, I filled in the arch with a piece of foamcore.

Another thing going on in these rooms is that I’m adding fireplaces to the corners. Originally I’d planned to put the fireplaces on the panel that opens, but ended up positioning the chimney on the edge of the panel to cover up a messy seam where the panel siding meets the house siding. So I decided to move the fireplaces to the corner, with the added benefit that I’ll be able to build in a little enclosure that hides all the wires running down from upstairs.

In theory, here’s how it will look when the panel’s open. That piece of wood is only 1″ wide, so it doesn’t block the view too much. (Way better than on the other side with the stairs…)

Since I ran into problems with the wallpaper mucilage discoloring my printie wallpaper, I bought paper for these rooms. These are Itsy Bitsy Minis papers and they’re actually 1:12 designs, but the print is small enough that I think they work fine for 1:24. I don’t like that Itsy Bitsy (among other companies) sells half scale wallpaper in smaller sheets, and buying the 1:12 meant I’d have more than enough with just one sheet of each. The flowers will go in the living room, and the gold medallion thingies (which are actually similar to the attic wallpaper I had to rip out) will go in the office.

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