I know it could have been worse. I've seen many homes with entire rooms full of wood paneling. We looked at house that had "finished" basements full of wood paneling... We only had one wall, but that was enough. 
The old spice room (Mike called it that because of the wallpaper) had one wall that was strangely covered in wood paneling. We were kind of afraid what we'd find behind the paneling, we couldn't really figure out why they would cover just one wall.
Remember how this room had bright blue carpet? When we removed the baseboard to removed the paneling, we found this. I guess at some point it also had red carpet... I just wonder if that was also with the old spice wallpaper (would have still matched, and we all know how the previous owners like to match everything to the wallpaper), or if the room was some other color/wallpaper at some point... some other color like...
Sneak peak behind the paneling... and.... green wall.
Warning: The next few pictures may hurt your eyes...
Could you even imagine a room painted this bright green color?!? It would be horrible! I only hope that they did not have that red carpet when the walls were this color.
Once we removed all of the wood paneling, this is what we were left with. We decided that the easiest thing to do was to just put up new drywall, the furring strips were already in place at the proper spacing for new drywall. You'd think that would have been a given, but with this house, I try to not assume anything...
Poor Trevi got stuck in the room with us when we were taking down the wood paneling, he really didn't like it. Please try not to notice that his face is dangerously close to a piece of trim with a nail sticking out of it on the window sill. I promise we do our best to keep our pets out of the construction mess.
We also removed the wallpaper! It looks so much better already. That red spot up near the ceiling in the picture above is some kind of mold (gross), we've been killing it with mold remover, it works great. That's after the first treatment. It's basically gone now.
I wish we had a before picture of the closet, but just image more old spice wallpaper, with a matching blue and red plaid paper on the closet shelf. Mike already started to prime/paint the trim in the closet in this picture. Wait, what's on the back of the closet door you ask?
Here's a close up of the closet door, those are old mad magazine stickers! The entire inside of the door is covered with them! I love it! I wish they were still whole stickers, but I think they're fun and I think we're going to leave them. They are on the inside of the door, so no one will ever see them unless they open the closet. It's just a reminder that this used to be a kid's room, I can just imagine what his parents thought when they discovered that he had completely covered his closet door with stickers :-)
And here's the new drywall. Mike and I can drywall, we just really don't like to do it. The door in the picture is the door into the room, the area around the hinges really bothers me but there wasn't much we could do to make it look any better. We had to cut back the drywall because the frame is now set into the wall on that side (since the wall was built out a little for the paneling).
The other side of the wall.
On Sunday Mike also painted the ceiling in this room and in the den, look how bright it is! This room took two coats of ceiling paint.
Oh, and in case you forgot, here's a reminder of what it looked like before :-)
Now we're trying to decide what to do about the baseboards in this room. 3 of the walls have the original baseboards, the wall that had then paneling does not. I do not think we can buy matching baseboards without having to have them custom milled. I haven't priced this, but I think it will be very expensive. We will also need about 10' of matching baseboard when we fix the stairs, we need to make a new skirt board. We are thinking about just removing the remaining baseboards from this room so that we can use them elsewhere in the house (stairs, other places that are beat up). We could then try to find something similar to put in this room, but could buy a standard baseboard instead of having to have it match perfectly. Or we could leave it as is and have something custom milled to match (getting extra for the stairs). Or we could just try to put a different baseboard on this one wall... we need to make a decision though, we're ready to paint this room!
3 Responses to wood paneling
I bet you're so excited to be getting this room done! That wallpaper was so funny.
Can you say hideous? I know what that's like. Did you ever see our current place before we took down wall paper? Shesh!
I can totally picture my 1968 brother stickering out his closet in that wacky room.
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