This sweet bedroom is in the 1700’s part of the Bloomfield house. It overlooks the pastures. This is the room where Lucy Rebecca Buck wrote portions of her published diary: ‘Shadows on My Heart’ during the early years of the Civil War. I can image her in here writing by candlelight just beneath the window sill by the fire. It’s truly the most serene of all the bedrooms (or maybe that’s because it’s almost finished  ). This restoration took a crazy amount of hours to get done… and it’s still not fully finished. Just getting the wall paper off took days. Underneath the wallpaper, the horse hair plaster walls were in surprisingly excellent shape. They looked to me like they had never really been painted. Only white washed and then probably wallpapered over the next century and a half.

Icky Closet that we removed

No window. Boarded up half way

Sad peeling & forgotten

Boarded up window

Below you’ll see why removing the wallpaper took FOREVER… it came off in tiny little pieces. Yes, we tried water. Yes, we tried steam. Yes, we tried wallpaper remover. Those old plaster walls were just not letting go!

Wallpaper coming off in tiny sections.

Hated this closet.

Still going…..

Finally all the wallpaper has been removed!

Wallpaper finally gone

Wallpaper finally gone

Next up comes the sanding. The walls were in such great shape. I hope I look as good at 244 year old as these horse hair plaster walls do. But they did need some sanding to smooth out the texture. There were a few holes & cracks that needed re-plastering here and there ~ probably from shifting and what looked to be some careless furniture maneuvering. So we plastered where needed and sanded again.

Next we sanded the trim. Got all the way down to the bare wood in some areas. It was such a hard mental debate to keep or not to keep the bare wood when we saw just how beautiful it was. To think it hadn’t been exposed in over 200 years. And the more interesting fun-fact is this wood was installed 244 year ago. Some of these boards are 6 inches wide. So the tree must have been at least a 100 years old before it was cut down. Then it was dried. So you’re looking at wood that is over 350 years old. Perfectly intact. This is the stuff we geak out on!

Almost down to the bare wood

Bare wood & sanded walls ready to prime

During the whole sanding process we had a very bad ceiling to repair. And come to find out, we had some visitors at some point.

Ceiling hole from water leak – upper left

First step to fixing: cut clean hole

Found some friends twins!

cut a square hole

add new lathe

re-plastered the cracks

and Ta-Da! Everything patched and ready

Time to Prime!

Hole repaired, plastering done and all primed!

Yucky Closet… BE GONE!

Icky Closet that we removed

Along the way we found beautiful touches of the past. These little stars were drawn above the mantel.

Behind the scary closet we found lovely wallpaper of yesteryear.

A preview of things to come. The original pine floors with a little elbow grease & tongue oil.

Finally an almost finished, soon to be adorned and decorated sweet, peaceful bedroom

Left the mantle & HL hinges distressed

After many long days of work – bedroom 1 is ready!

Hope you love what we’re doing to our dear home Bloomfield. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think. Would love your feedback. Thanks for reading & being such an important part of our journey!!