Home Decorating

Southland Times, Issue 21264, 10 December 1930, Page 18

Home Decorating

Perhaps many women, at present depressed bv the fact that summer sunshine has an unpleasant, habit of seeking out all the drab corners in a house, may find encouraging an account of the successful efforts of an amateur interior decorator to revive the faded walls of her home. At any rate here it is:— . .. I had been furtively looking at the ceiling and walls of my dining room through the winter, thankfully thinking that it could wait until the spring for a new coat of kalsomine. Walls and ceiling of this room were in plain white. These are very cool, and clean-looking as long as they remain white, but when their pristine freshness has departed they leave one with an uncomfortable feeling of a duty waiting to be done. Thus it was that the spring found me this year with a not very flourishing bank balance, no menfolk available, and, as a business woman with very little spare time. So I decided that I must do my own decorating. I had found from a modest previous experience that filling in cracks in the walls took almost as long as the kalsomining itself. This year, then, I saved a good deal of fatigue and trouble by doing this part of the work before kalsomining day. Mixing plaster of paris to a paste with water, I spread it over the cracks with a knife, carefully smoothing off any surplus before it dried. Then, having swept the walls and ceiling. I washed them well with a large paint brush and relays of hot water to remove the old kalsomine. , , , The prospect of standing with one s head near the middle of the ceiling and with nothing to cling to is, I must admit, rather terrifying at first, but one soon becomes used to it. To reach the ceiling I perched oh some boxes and chairs stood on a long kitchen table. This gave a firmer footing than the regulation step ladders and plank which always seems to make me feel suspended in mid-air. Kalsomining itself is quite easy. I procured a good brand of white and another of pale cream, the latter for the walls below the picture rail. Following the directions on the packets most exactly, I mixed the kalsomine to a cream consistency. I did as much of the ceiling and top of the walls as the length of the table would permit, keeping the strokes in one direction, and the mixture of an even consistency. It is necessary to stir the mixture frequently, as the thick

part sinks to the bottom. Then I moved the table round the room until at last all the white part was finished. The next was simple, and the new cream-coloured walls were a pleasant contrast to their all-white predecessors. As a final touch, I put a prettily patterned frieze just under the picture rail, to tone with the colour scheme of the room. Ordinary flour and boiling water paste stuck this. The result was most gratquite a tonic to the rest of the room. Since ifyin- and the new two-colour walls seemed then I have treated other rooms in the same manner, and my house looks < very spick and span, and not in .the least amateurish.” In those rooms that boasted no picture rail I covered the join of the two colours with a narrow frieze with the same happy result. I marked the wall down from the ceiling at intervals at a height level with the top of the door, and ran a pencilled line along as a guide for the frieze. Who shall say that housewives cannot do their own decorating?