For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us the word “wallpaper” to work with. This reminded me of when we purchased a 100 year old Queen Anne Victorian house when we lived in Massachusetts back in the 80s and 90s. It was a bit of a fixer-upper, and nearly every room in the house, including the kitchen and the bathrooms, had wallpaper on the walls.
Neither my wife nor I are big fans of wallpaper, and so we commenced the tedious task of removing the old wallpaper. But much to our chagrin, we discovered that most walls had multiple layers of wallpaper. In some cases, three or even four layers.
As we peeled and scraped these layers of wallpaper from every room in the house, we made a fascinating discovery. The oldest (and, therefore, the original) layer of wallpaper in a few of the rooms was a toile (or twall) pattern. Toile patterns, like the one in the image below, typically have a highly detailed, repeated pattern depicting a pastoral or natural scene, most involving people and/or animals.
I thought it was really interesting to see the kinds of wallpapers that had been applied to the walls of our Victorian era home, but I thought that the toile paper was really cool. I wasn’t able to save any of the toile wallpaper, but I told my wife that we should see if we could find vintage toile pattern wallpaper to apply to our walls.
She said no.
This, That, and the Other 
We removed the wallpaper in a house once and found the walls were painted in green and purple checks. Gave my brother nightmares
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Good heavens…….
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😂
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She said no to wallpapers? Shame……
I was wallpapering a room many years ago when this singer came on the radio. I didn’t know who he was but thought gosh he’s good. He’ll go a long way. He was singing ‘Burn Down the Mission’. Yes, Elton John. What is interesting is I can pinpoint the very panel I was papering at the time…..shows some memories are never forgotten Fan
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The history of the house through wallpapers!
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Indeed!
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👍🏼
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We have a similar story and if anyone hasn’t tried to remove wallpaper, let me just say it’s a bitch but you’ll develop upper body strength like you never had before!
In the end we decided to go with a chic Art Deco wallpaper in the hallway connecting the living area of our ranch style house to the bedrooms. The walls in all the other rooms are painted in pale colors with the exception of our kitchen (Kennebunkport Green) and our sunroom (Adobe Red). The kitchen walls are strewn with colorful plaques from Italy. The sunroom, which is directly off the kitchen, gets full sun all day and is my favorite room in the house. The brick red color is warm and calming and the walls of windows make me feel like I’m outside.
If I knew how to post pix here I would!
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Sounds nice!
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Lol it’s often the way with older houses , wallpaper over wallpaper I can remember my dad doing it too
Great for seeing how the fashion changes 💜
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It is beautiful to behold, but a apin in the derriere to remove.
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I’m with your wife.
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That’s really interesting!
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I finally had to look this up, to see spellings and pronunciations. A woman told me, when I told her I liked her curtains, that she thinks their print is called “twaoih”(she didn’t spell it).
http://www.teapotsandpolkadots.net/2010/06/tuile-toile-tulle-and-beyond.html
Tuile, toile, tulle: okay now?
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Interesting. I always pronounced “toile” as “twall.” And now I also know the difference between a macaroon and a macaron, which I didn’t know before.
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So, I’ve looked around… wanted to find out how it’s pronounced in French. The L is pronounced in French as well (and I like the French pronunciation as I like the French on niche). So, she was correct in a sense. I told her when she lived at one house, that I liked her curtains. When she moved to another house, I told her I liked her curtains. (She must have loved them, she took them along.) They might’ve been more like drapes, with the pull-string kind of situation. But I digress. Both times, she said, “I think” as to the fabric or print. So, she gave me a clue she could be wrong; she was wrong.
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I like macaroons better than macarons,
and I’ve learned Recamier,
which I wanted to know since I watched Nightmare Alley.
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that sounds very cool indeed! ❤
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I remember scrapping off layers and layers both at my parent’s house and my grandmother’s place. It revealed some interesting patterns.
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