Little table and Framing the Past

We headed out today to Ikea this morning and then had plans to go downtown to Designer Fabrics but I was having one of my off days so we didn't get there after all which I'm disappointed about as I was really looking forward to it. We did take a quick trip over to Bayview Village mall after Ikea though to check out Restoration Hardware. I haven't been there in a long time but love there designs. It has changed quite a bit to a very monochromatic scheme of all natural textures and tones which is very very easy to live with.

   
Before I left the sun was shining and filling the dining room with gorgeous sunlight and so  I snapped a photo of this cute little table I found on Kijiji and picked up yesterday. It is the perfect size for this spot in the dining room. It's a darker stain than the dining room table so I will either have to strip it and stain it light or paint it and it will get some new knobs. Here it is with a special something sitting on top that I will tell you about later.

I did pick up a couple of baskets for the living room while we were at Ikea and when I got home I again cleared everything out that offended my eye and added a few more decorative items from my bathroom along with the baskets to the built-ins out.   I also removed all the various sized pictures and added these shell prints that were also from the bathroom and think it feels so much better to have the same size frames here. It's too bad I don't have four more of these but the frame sizes are perfect so I know I will find something else.

 I will have to keep my eyes open for  some more affordable items for the shelves as well.

 So we have  this great old built-in cupboard in our upstairs hallway that have 3 big solid wood drawers on the bottom. 

And when we first moved in I pulled out the bottom drawer to find this pretty pale green old wallpaper on the inside of it. So I sprayed the paper with water and carefully removed it to save for our records

 and would you look what I found beneath it, another layer of even older hand blocked wallpaper! Hand blocked means they would roll the ink onto the paper just the way you would stencil instead of it being manufactured by machines. What you are looking at above is actually what is left on the wall when I  carefully removed this paper which ended up coming off in pieces. It is extremely old and because it was so vibrant the ink transferred and stayed on the back wall as well. It has beautiful jewel tones of the most intense gorgeous red, and pretty greens and blues. I have kept the pieces I removed from the wall carefully wrapped in wax paper and between two pieces of glass stored away for probably 10 or more years now.

The reason the paper is inside the built-ins in the first place is because our house was renovated in 1915 and the built-ins were added then. This incredibly colourful paper would have been what the old hallway was decorated with. I can't even imagine how it looked but oh what a statement it must have made. Our entire home, walls and ceilings were wallpapered and the smooth horsehair plaster beneath the layers never ever saw a coat of paint. Back when I first found this wallpaper it I took it to the Markham museum and they told me it looked like it was a french paper. I still hope to find out exactly where it is from someday as I find it fascinating.

I tried to put the pieces back together of the original paper to make it look like the pattern left on the wall  but they just didn't go back together in any order that looked good with many gaps between them and so instead I cropped the picture of the pattern that was left on the wall  and had it printed at Staples for just $3.00 and put it in this frame I already had from Home Sense. 

I think it is very special and a unique paper that says our homes first home owners Janet Wilson Forrest was just as prideful of her home then as we are of it today.