The Ledford-Colley House: Fancy Room Update

This was the room that sold us on the house. The "Best" or "Fancy" room was reserved for visitors, while the rest of the house was functional - for family use and daily living. Fancy woodwork and trim create wainscoting around this "Best" room. Fortunately, the original wall paint remains intact. All other first floor rooms have several paint layers making the paint history difficult to ascertain. The Fancy room walls have a thin transparent wash of what appears to be milk paint. It's a warm grey that shows the beautiful grain of the hand-planed heart pine boards. The ceiling is painted blue, as is the baseboard in the same color. The chair railing has traces of dark red.

The wainscoting skirts the entire room capped with chair rail molding. Each of the three windows incorporates the rail molding as part of its bottom sill. When we first cleared the house, many of the cross pieces in the wainscoting were missing. The few that remained were painted a blue- a much later application of bright blue, thickly painted. We think that the original cross pieces were the same color as the walls.

Each section of wainscoting varies in length and contains a horizontal and two vertical boards cut to fit. The missing pieces left their outlines revealing the unpainted wall board underneath.

It's been a long four-and-a-half year journey with this room, and we're not quite finished. But I thought it was time to reflect and look back on our progress.

June 2011. We see the room for the first time.

2015. Floors are done, and we are ready to clean walls and restore the wainscoting.

We planed old heart pine to restore the missing cross pieces. We cut precisely to match the old outlines, and fixed with old square nails exactly to the original configuration.