Personality . . . .

I'm not sure how it happened, but I recieved both of my orders from the UK exactly a week after they notified me the packages had been posted.  Either they posted them the week before notifying me and the packages made their way to me over two weeks (rather fast for UK to Australia) or they were posted when the notifications were sent and they took just a week to arrive.  One week is faster than mail can travel from one side of Australia to the other, so one week from one side of the world to the other had me more than a little surprised.

Anyway, with these orders in hand I could finally start mking the rooms of the house look like, well, rooms.  The blank box that was the dining room was instantly tansformed by the application of wallpaper.

The paper used in here is "El Dorado" made by Les Chinoseries and it is absolutely gorgeous.  It's also quite expensive, so rather than buy a third sheet to have enough to cover all the walls in here, I've used an oversized fireplace that will have a wide overmantle ontop that covers the large gap where there wasn't quite enough paper for this huge room.  The fireplace is on the side wall rather than the back wall so that the stunning mural scene becomes the main focus.  Another of the new arrivals were doors.  Despite the fact that I wanted to put a set of double doors in this room, I only bought single doors.  It was an easy matter to take two doors, turn one around to open the opposite way and then stick the frames together.  Some stain later the doors were ready to go into the rather large hole in the wall.

Also in the packages was the flooring for the Hall next door.  It's a shiny marble tile effect paper with a Greek Key style border.  The walls have been papered with a scrapbooking paper with a very subtle pattern.  This paper is plan B for the room.  See the bits of red at the edges of the paper?  That's the colour the Hall was to be painted, the intense colour broken by white panelling around the bottom and lots of white plaster decorations on the walls.  But the red paint I had was old and left clumpy bits everywhere, plus it looked terrible next to the classy paper in the dining room next door.  And by the way, the remaing red will be covered by coving (etc) eventually.  Now that I had the floor paper, I could start to paint the stairs to match (hopefully) the tone of the marble.  The stairs have been given a coat of white, but I'm still mostly filling, sanding and re-filling the messy ends to get them perfectly smooth before they get any more paint.

 Downstairs in the basment there are more doors.  One leads to the mystery room on the right, the other leads to nowhere but gives the impression that there is something behind it.  The walls in the hall have been painted "vellum" with some scrapbooking paper left over from a few years ago lining the lower parts.

In the kitchen next door the chinmey is in position and the cooking range has started to be built within it.

So with the exception of the mystery room in the basement, all the rooms on the bottom two floors of the house are starting to show some personality.  Perhaps by this time next week the rooms in the upper two floors will be able to say the same?