Home Style Post: Stylish Solution to Temporarily Covering Damaged Plaster

When my husband and I moved to Northwest Ohio from a very small town in Maryland, an hour or so north of Washington, DC, we were so excited to see more reasonable prices for homes out in Ohio! In Maryland, we were living in a very small townhome. We bought it a couple of months before we married, while my husband was still finishing up college. Prices out there are very high, so we chose an unfashionable area of town to get the most for our money.

Once we got married and moved in together, we immediately started renovating it. Thankfully, I married a man who used to work for a home construction business, so he can practically build a home from scratch!

Our little townhome looked pretty good once we finished. We kept the updates modest, because the housing market fell, and we didn't want to invest much money since we weren't sure about getting a return. But in the end we were pleased with our work and we're now renting it out.

House shopping in rural Northwest Ohio was exciting at first, since we could afford so much more in Ohio, compared to what we could afford in the DC area...but we still didn't find anything that wowed us - and we really wanted that wow factor.

Finally we found THE home. A very old house built in 1876 right in the downtown area of one of the rural small towns here. The ceilings in the main rooms are almost 12 feet high! However, we are going to eventually have to renovate this house, the same as we did our last...it will just be quite a bit more expensive, since it is double the square feet!

As we make some updates to this house here and there, I thought I'd start blogging about it. You might get some ideas, or could pass some on to me as I go!

So here is one of the first updates we've made. This was what our dining room looked like when we first bought this house:
A month ago, I tore down the wallpaper, only to find damaged plaster walls underneath. To re-plaster a wall is extremely expensive. To put drywall up is not so expensive, but can be quite a hassle. My husband wants to eventually re-plaster to keep with the "old" feeling of the house, so he wouldn't allow me to hang new drywall.

Our solution was to embrace the imperfections in the wall by highlighting them with a metallic glaze over semi-gloss paint, so that our walls would resemble beaten metal.

We added some texture in the paint as well, to give the walls even more interest.

I need to cover the wallpaper above the chandelier with a ceiling medallion, add more crystals to our chandelier, and get some updated sconces (the scones on the wall right now are the original sconces that were added to the house once electricity was installed).

We plan to add crown molding, too, but my husband wants to strip all the paint on the woodwork and bring it back to the way the house used to look. The woodwork in this room is oak, and he wants to stain it back to that.

The paint we used is from the Brilliant Metals collection from Valspar at Lowe's. The color is called Green Lame.