Room 2 - Marble Hall

The second room to come as part of Hungerford Manor is the Marble Hall, the grand entrance to the Manor.  It is a lovely panelled room with a marble floor, and has the grand staircase on the right and the Chinoiserie Salon on the left.  The Drawing Room is attached to the rear of the Marble Hall.

After some discussions that have taken place on a couple of groups, I have decided that it might be an idea to show how some of the kits I do that look quite complicated are actually so well cut and planned that they aren't difficult if taken one step at a time, so I photographed each step of this room as I did it.

Because I know from the Drawing room that the ceiling moulding takes several coats to cover with the light paint, I thought that I'd start painting it right away so that I could put a coat of paint on it in between doing steps on other parts.  The sample ceiling had been painted with different colours and I really liked it and decided to do mine the same.  First I traced around the moulding onto the ceiling.  I did forget to take a photo of that part so I re-traced part of it on the underside of the floor.  If you are a quilter you will recognise the double wedding ring pattern.

In the photo below you can see it after I painted the leaf-shaped sections with three coats of Semco 'Rich Blue'.  You might note that I've gone over the pencil lines.  That's because when you trace inside something it naturally is a little bit smaller, and I wanted to allow enough overlap that no bare timber would be seen once the moulding was put into place.

When all the blue was dry I started on the red, doing three coats of Semco 'Antique Red'.  I know it looks pretty grotty like this, with the bits of bare wood showing but have a look at it with the moulding piece placed over it to test it out.

In between doing the red and blue, and the other steps (walls) I had been doing the moulding with Ceramcoat Ivory paint.  It took four coats to get a good coverage of this piece, sanding lightly between each coat.  I haven't glued the moulding down here, I just wanted to check that no bare wood showed and that neither of the colours showed where they shouldn't

This is the moulding by itself.

The trim for each of the walls came like this.  Each trim is in the correct place that it needs to go on the wall.  This is the sheet for the right wall, and at the top it has the trim for the doors.  In the archway are the pieces for the wainscot panels.

I did the left wall first, as instructed.  The black area is where the fireplace goes.  You can see how the trim is set on the mdf wall.  I only used the trim on one side of the door because I'll have this door closed and on the other side I'll use the door and the trim for the adjoining room.

Now I'll take you through the process step by step - it's not as complicated as it appears.  I didn't take step-by-step photos of the first wall, but I did for the right hand wall.  First of all you remove the main border and the trim from the sheet and match it against the wall, making sure the edges meet.

Then all the interior parts are removed by cutting through the little tabs holding them in place and the outer frame is glued onto the wall.

The next frame is just to keep the inside trims in place so it is not glued, just put into the outside frame.

I held this frame in place with painter's tape so it didn't move, then glued the outside part of each section inside this frame.

Once the glue had bonded a bit the placement frame is removed.

And here are the trims perfectly in place.

The next lot of frames is put inside those frames, but not glued because they are again simply placement aids for the central pieces.

The central pieces are glued into place.

And the placement pieces in between are removed.  Then the wainscot trim is done the same way on the lower section of the wall, using the upper trims as guides for positioning.

Yesterday I googled Tudor panelled rooms and I saw a photo of two that I really liked.  I know that they are much grander than the manor but they did give me some ideas, including extending a cream cornice down the walls a bit to the top of the panelling.

So I decided to do that for the Hall.  I didn't decide until after I had glued the dentil trim on to the top so for the other two rooms I painted the underneath first and also did a coat on the dentil trim each time I did one on the ceiling moulding

Here's the left wall with the dentil trim glued on, and also with the fireplace sitting in place but not glued on.  Another thing I checked when I googled was whether the panelled rooms had stone fireplaces like I thought I remembered seeing on television and those photos both did have them.  So I played around with paint colours until I got something that seemed an okay colour for the white stone I wanted and gave the fireplace three coats of that.  Then I added the teeniest bit of grey (leftover from my playing around with colours) and sort of stippled/dabbed in circular motions with that over the white.  When it was dry I did it with black, first drybrushing to get a less definite look on the sides of the fireplace and on the hearth, and the tiniest bit up over the front as though the fire has smoked over the years, then doing some areas with straight black.

After all that it was time to commence painting to get some sort of wood effect.  The method Gayle suggests is to give everything some coats of mid-brown so I used  Nutmeg.  Here's the rear wall,

the left wall

I meant to take the right wall but ended up taking two of the left wall - I have a foggy brain at the moment! :)  That's one of the ways that grief is manifesting itself.  That and a feeling of detachment from life.  But back to the manor house.

Today I started by going over the Nutmeg paint with what I thought was burnt umber but I had picked up the wrong tube and it was a much darker colour called coffee.  I painted over the nutmeg colour, using an old raggy brush,, and going in a direction that the wood grain would go.  Then I dampened the brush and rubbed it over the centre of each of the raised panels, removing some of the paint as though age had darkened the corners and recessed edges. In some areas I was a bit enthusiiastic but the overall effect is okay, and most of the flat panels will be covered with paintings probably.  It actually looks worse in the photo than it does in reality.

Then I glued the cream moulding to the painted ceiling, and the marble paper to the floor. putting them under some heavy books to flatten them while I waited for the paint on the walls and doors to dry.  I had to leave for an appointment and didn't have much time when we returned, but there was time to put a final coat of cream on the dentil moulding and that dried quickly.

It doesn't take long to assemble the roombox once all that is done and once again it looks spectacular.  Altogether different from the Drawing Room of course, but quite a dramatic room even though it has come out considerably darker than I had intended the panelling to be.  I really like this room.

The door in the left wall goes to the Chinoiserie Room, the arch on the right wall goes to the Grand Staircase and the double doors at the back (which fell of when I was taking the photo and I didn't notice) go to the Drawing Room.

I'm glad I did the colours on the ceiling though, and I will definitely look for something that looks quite bright for the upholstery.

 And I really like the effect of the dentil moulding done in the cream as well.  The ceiling doesn't quite meet all the walls so I need to touch up the gaps with cream paint.

All in all I'm really pleased once again with this room.