05-May-2016

The Balcony room gets back it´s original face

When I took over the management of castle Grünsberg from my father the so called balcony room (Balkonzimmer), the former ladies room in the second floor of the Palas had this appearance:
One can see to the right and the left of the doorframe 2 strips of the wallpaper are missing, having been removed to build in 2 steel carriers -6.5 cm broad- hinged with steel carrieres in floor and ceiling and so securing the castle´s second floor statically.

My parents found the wallpaper in a french wallpaper-book in 1965 and ordered it. After papering the walls we found it much too massive for this small room.
The three armed chandelier had been damaged during restoration part I, one arm broke off.
For a long time we had had the plan to remove the wallpaper and to restore the original setting of the room. Finally, 18 years after the beginning of part I of the restoration, we had the possibility -using all the financial power we could afford- for a part of the restoration only for beauty. Part III looked exclusively after the stucco, the plastering, the walls and the floors of the first and the second storeys of the Palas.
After removing the wallpaper we found especially in the middle trusses quite a lot of cracks put down to the grenade hit in 1945, 28th of April (!)

Atfer closing the cracks professionally and after exact diagnosis we restored the original setting of Stucco and walls. We repainted the walls with chalc paint, coloured with beechs´ash in an old tecnic (so called "cross stroke"), We cleaned the stucco and completed it carefully. Now it shines again in its original colouring!

Instead of the venetian chandelier we replaced it with a former tavern cantilever from the 18th century changed into a luster.
My grandma had found and bought it at a raffles in 1925
The gold of the stucco is no leaf gold but dissolved and with the paint brush applied. Ist been refreshened and in the overpainted places uncovered and cleaned
The south wall appeared like this before the restoration:
After remounting the paintings the balcony room is looking brightly and lightly