Confederacy of a Dunce - Wallpaper museum

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

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As I've mentioned a few times before, the Dunces have recently moved into a new flat which required some amount of cosmetic effort and modernization (you'll have to wait for an upcoming post to see more details). One urgent need was to replace the ancient water heater, a process not without its problems. But there was a tiny window of time between the removal of the old water heater and the installation of the new one, during which the wall behind the heater was visible.

The previous owner of the flat bought it in 1977, and did the place up to a high standard at that time (including installation of the now-dead water heater). So the wallpaper behind the heater dates from before that time, which you can tell at a glance from the picture below. At the top is a hole in the wall: the original flue for the water heater, which was badly filled by the heating engineers, then knocked out and patched more appropriately. Below the hole you can see a nice indication of some previous choices of decor. Most of which are nicer than the present wallpaper which we have not replaced or painted over just yet (mostly gray/greenish, textured and shiny, as you can see around the outside. On the right side, the whitish bits are actually the camera flash, reflected off the textured shiny bits).

Yes it's a huge picture; sorry about that but I felt it was the best way to clearly show the different patterns.