copyright 2012 Bettina Network, inc. 2012

This is an ongoing project – one of several we hope will end with a video which you can access showing the entire process.

The process will be blogged in installments since it is difficult to write for a long time on such a topic!

We talked to many guests, host families, friends, to decide what we could do to get ready for the fall season which would result in our utility bills being reduced over the winter of 2012-2013.

We came up with the upholstering of walls.  We’ve started small with one bedroom and the results are beginning to look spectacular.  Not only will our utility bills be reduced but  the upscaling of the room has been substantial.  We have only put up padding on two walls and already our air conditioning is practically non-essential.  In spite of very warm weather – over 80 degrees – we turn the air conditioners on in the mornings for about two hours and the room stays cool all day and into the evening.  Hopefully, that presages a wonderful savings on the heating bills this winter – AND we haven’t even added the material yet. So lets see what change that makes!!

I was raised in a house where the walls were covered ceiling to floor with draperies – brocade, double lined – to keep out the heat and the cold.  I didn’t think much of what that meant until recently when I came across an entry in one of my diaries which described our living room.

Floating the possibility around to everyone who would listen – it started out as weird and ‘historical’, but not for todays home.  Since all the conversations started, those we talked to first are coming back to say – ‘hey, that might not be such a bad idea – try it and let us know what happens.’

Well, like everything in this world, it started out as a simple project and now has become all encompassing, consuming and we are looking everywhere to find out ‘how to’.

Lots of people have ideas and some have actually upholstered walls, but that isn’t the way we want it done.  Our original purpose was to save on utility bills and secondarily to add to the elegance of our lifestyle.  So looking around for the original purpose we found a padding which we have stapled to the walls.  No, we didn’t use furring strips.  We stapled the padding directly to the walls, stapling around the windows, right below the moulding and right above the floor moulding.  Seems there was enough wood or something to hold the padding – dacron.

Our biggest problem was which stapler to use.  Almost no one knew anything about an upholstery stapler that we could use for this project.

We searched the internet, old magazines, saved articles, and we drove friends crazy for ‘how to’ possibilities.  Stay tuned for what we used!

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