Soon after posting the pictures of the Rosedale’s wallpaper borders, I realized the blue border downstairs clashes with the blue front door. Why didn’t I put them next to each other before gluing in the border? Ah, that would have been too easy…

Since I’d used up the Brodnax designs, I found some nice samples of Arts & Crafts borders at Bradbury & Bradbury Art Wallcoverings and used one of these to make my own. (They have some really nice designs there; I’ll probably hit up the site again when I get to work on the half scale bungalow I have waiting in the wings.) I sized the border so it would be slightly larger than the blue one and glued it directly on top.

The colors complement each other much better. In the photo you can see the blue border peeping up from behind the new one in spots, but this isn’t really noticeable in person. I also decided to extend the border across the stairs and added a piece of wood trim above.

I still do like that blue border even if the color wasn’t quite right for downstairs, so I’m using it in the attic room instead.

I also ripped out the border in the office. (Right after taking the picture below, in fact.) I just wasn’t happy with it… it was much smaller than the others, and messy in the corner. It came off surprisingly easily. Maybe I didn’t use enough glue. So I still have to figure out what to use there, and in the bathrooms. Maybe something else from the Bradbury & Bradbury site.

I’m also thinking about adding a very thin piece of trim above and below the borders to give them cleaner lines. I used wallpaper borders since it seemed like it would be quicker than crown molding, but in the end I don’t think I’ve saved myself any time…

Since the Rosedale’s rooms have all sorts of wonky angles (some intentional and some a result of the bash) and since I really hate cutting crown molding, I decided to use wallpaper borders instead. I’m not entirely happy with the results. It was hard to get my hands into some of the tiny corners to glue the paper in straight, which sort of defeats the point. I might end up gluing a very small piece of wood trim to the top edges of the walls to make them look cleaner. But I’m getting ahead of myself!

The borders I’ve used so far are the Arts & Crafts designs from Brodnax Prints. There are five designs altogether. I want a unique design for each rooms so I’ll have to come up with another solution for the remaining three rooms.

I started with the master suite. In addition to the wallpaper borders, in this room I also had to add trim around the doorway that opens up onto the wing. I initially tried something simple.

I liked the look of this, but as I got ready to add the border I realized that either the ceiling or the door is crooked, and it was going to look really obvious.

So I replaced the top with a larger piece of 1:12 door casing. It’s kind of ornate compared to the trim in the rest of the house, and you can still tell it’s crooked if you pay attention to the design, but it minimizes the problem. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself.

Here’s the master suite with the wallpaper border and baseboards in. For baseboards I used plain old strip wood. I came up with a new system to make the prep work go faster: I painted the entire 24-inch piece of strip wood, then cut the pieces. Less hassle than painting each small piece individually.

As I mentioned in my last blog, I didn’t like how the insides of the doorways turned out, so I added strip wood to make them look nicer. After gluing the wood to the inside edges, I filled the cracks with wood filler and carefully repainted the trim. The three pictures below show before wood filler, after wood filler, and after paint. (They’re three different doors, so it’s not exactly a progression.)

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