Renovating or decorating was one of the few topics on which my parents disagreed. My mother usually won bringing home rolls of wallpaper which she had chosen and which my father was to put up. He never wanted to do so, considering it a waste of money in the first place. My mother was frugal, buying in sales, and since my father would do just about anything for my mother, he would set to.
I remember one decorating session when I was about 14. It was a weekend and we all helped to strip off the old wallpaper from the one accent wall in our living room. It was a messy process, involving a bucket of water and a wet sponge used to soak the paper to soften it, scoring it with a knife on occasion to get the water to soak in, then scraping it off the wall with various flat-bladed tools. We were thrilled when large pieces of wallpaper came off, but all too often we would be scraping away for ages at small pieces determined to stay on that wall for eternity, or so it seemed to us. It was hard work, making our arms and hands ache. The floor and the wall would soon be a mess, though we always put down drop cloths to protect the parquet flooring. Water and sodden bits of wallpaper dropped onto the floor and if, we weren’t careful, could soon be transferred on our feet to other parts of the house. It was a constant battle to keep everything contained in that one area.
Finally, with the wall clean and any defects patched by my father to make the surface smooth, we watched as he tackled the task ahead of him. Soon we saw our father standing on a chair, holding a plumb line at ceiling height, before marking on the wall with a pencil the straight line shown by the cord. This was to ensure that the first strip of new paper was going to hang straight. Then, ready to start properly, he set up the kitchen table to serve him as a pasting table. He used a large wide brush to apply the paste which he had made up in a bowl, to one strip of wallpaper at a time. Then, folding this long strip of paper in layers over his arm, he would stand on the chair again, allowing the paper to fall gently against the wall, where he could slide the strip around to make sure it was in the correct place. Finally, using another dry soft brush or a cloth, he smoothed it down removing any air bubbles caught underneath, pushing them to the open edges where they would disappear like magic. Only when he was satisfied that all was perfect, would he get down from the chair and tackle a second strip of wallpaper, occasionally muttering under his breath about having to match up the floral pattern my mother had chosen.
