Refreshing The Farmhouse Dining Room Walls

Looking for a way to quickly update the walls in a dining room? Interested in learning how to remove wallpaper border? Here are a few tips!

My husband and I moved into the house I grew up in in July 2001.  My parents moved to a modular house on the same property.  While my Mom was still alive, we really couldn’t make any changes to the farmhouse.  Even though she wasn’t living there any longer, in her mind it was still her house.  She did go along with our painting the first floor walls to brighten up the interior and we had to replace the dining room floor due to damage.  She wasn’t really happy with me removing the carpet in the living room either.  Or the fact that I took all the drapes down! When I drug the wool rug down from the upstairs backroom she really thought I had lost my mind!  It was a rug they had purchased when they were first married!

My parents had  lived in the farmhouse for 53 years so it is easy to see why she felt the way she felt.  I was busy with work and didn’t have the energy to fight her about making big changes. Thankfully,  I was free to decorate it how I wanted so that worked out!

Wallpaper Borders!

She loved her wallpaper borders.  There was either wallpaper or a wallpaper boarder in the entryway, the kitchen, the dining room, the bathroom, going up the stairs, and in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She would use it on furniture when she didn’t use her other favorite; contact paper!  Most of the actual wallpaper was still in decent shape.  The wallpaper borders were a different story.

My parents had paneled the walls in the majority of the house during the 1970s.  The house was built in 1893 and had plaster walls. Most of the downstairs was a pecan colored paneling that we painted yellow when we moved in.  Mom had the dining room paneled with a paneling that looked like colonial wallpaper.  Her main decorating style was Early American.  At some point in the 1990s she had the dining room paneling painted a warm white and she added the wallpaper border around the perimeter of the room way up high.

When we decided to put the house on the market and move to Florida, I decided to tackle the wallpaper border in the dining room.  The farmhouse had high ceilings.  I am not sure if there were 10 ft or 12 ft but they were (and still are) high.  The high ceilings in the house must have made an impression on me when I was growing up.  I remember going to an open house with my parents when I was 8 or 9 years old.  My Uncle was a realtor, and he was showing a ranch style house.  When we got back in the car, I said something along the lines of “how does anyone live with ceilings that low?”!

I had already tackled the wallpaper situation in the entryway, so I knew what to do and what not to do.  You can read about the entryway makeover here:

Removing the Border

I grabbed my spray bottle of warm water mixed with fabric softener, my scoring tool and my scraper and climbed up the ladder.  I am really not a fan of heights even though I often had to climb up on the counter to get things off the shelves at the flower shop.  Most of the time when I was working on the dining room, Dave was off doing something else, so I didn’t even have a spotter!

Because the wall that I was working on was actually painted paneling, I didn’t gouge any big holes in the wall this time!  Some of the border came off super easily and some parts required a little more spraying and scraping.  I eventually got it all off.

Ready to Paint

I did not want to unload and move the two corner cabinets out of the way, so we just covered them with sheets.

The above pictures were taken after I removed the border but before I touched up the paint.  I went to the local hardware store and picked up some paint samples.  PPG (Pittsburgh Paint Group) Horseradish was the closest match to the current paint.  I did remove all the nails from the walls and filled the holes.  I painted the areas that had been covered with wallpaper border and touched up the rest of the walls.  It looks rather nice, don’t you think?

After Border was Removed and Walls Touched Up with Fresh Paint

The dining room table has three more leaves stored inside the table.  My Mom purchased it from her sister-in-law when they moved into the farmhouse.  It has a total of 6 chairs.  I had it in my house in Cincinnati, OH when I lived there.

Near the middle of the bottom of the picture, you can see a handle.  That pulls down to expose the storage area for the extra leaves.

To see how I used the spray bottle/fabric softener technique to remove the wallpaper border in the entryway, please see this post: How to Remove Wallpaper Border and How Not to Remove Wallpaper!