The Beacon Hill part 4

Having decided to just get on with it and wallpaper all the rooms, I am pretty glad that I did. The paper is more expensive than I would like, but the result looks a whole lot better, so I'll run with it. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the process is pretty easy and way less messy than I expected. I'm using Yes Paste for my adhesive rather than wallpaper mucilage, and I have a little plastic palette knife that makes spreading a thin even layer of glue way easier than a brush. Yes Paste doesn't grab and hold immediately, so I've been spreading the glue on each paper sheet, washing my hands, picking up the paper and placing it lightly on the wall, washing my hands, then smoothing it into place. I'm pretty impressed with how easy and clean the installation has been so far! So at least one thing is going right.

Starting wallpaper installation on the first and second floors.

The wallpaper needed to be in place before I could install the staircase, so I focused on the middle rooms on the first and second floors first. All the other rooms can be wallpapered later, but these two had to be done before I could go any further. The wallpaper covered the massive damage to the wall beautifully, but I am putting in baseboards in that room so only half of the wall is covered so far. I'll post a better photo when that process is done.

Both staircases assembled and sanded.

I didn't take a lot of photos during the staircase construction and installation. Construction was really easy and I was done way sooner than I expected, and installation was... interesting. I'm not really sure how this happened, but the staircase for the bottom floor ended up a good 3/16" of an inch too large in EVERY DIRECTION. Not only did I have to trim off all of the tabs, but I also needed to hack and sand pieces off of pretty much every part of the staircase. In addition, I just could not get the top lined up properly with the slots on the second floor, so I had to cut the bannister trim piece off and install it separately from the second floor. Several decorative bits just didn't fit at all and had to be cut off, so now I need to replace them with whole new fiddly bits of wood.

The giant clamp holding the staircase in place delivers 300 lbs of pressure, which the Dictionary of Numbers informs me is the weight of an adult female lion.

Despite not working at all, installing the staircase still went fairly quickly. Here everything is clamped in place to cure for a couple of days. Using the giant new clamp my husband bought me, I was able to fix a few of the warping issues I had with the walls. I chiseled out all the old glue and used a glue syringe to place new glue, and the clamp managed to keep everything together! The left rooms on the first and second floor look much better now.