The previous owner of our house had a thing for the early 90’s fad of country blue and mauve with flowers, teddy bears and rag dolls scattered all over the place. I won’t even talk about how tacky my half-bath is, but the wallpaper in the dining room was tolerable because it was white with little blue and pink flowers on it… but it’s showing its age in the worst way. The dining room is one of the few rooms in our house that is very close to being finished in terms of interior decorating, it just needs a few touches here and there… and one of those is to take down that wallpaper and paint.
I started the project yesterday with just a little corner behind my fish tank. I suspect I will be done with the wallpaper removal process in about an hour, and unfortunately, that won’t be the hard part. The hard part comes in when I realized that one of the most common reasons for choosing to use wallpaper in a space, is that wallpaper hides imperfections in the wall.
Behind the wallpaper, there are all sorts of knicks, divets and scratches in the wallboard that were just primed over. The drywall mud in the corners was just sanded down well enough to knock it back, and let’s not forget that there’s so much glue remaining on the walls that it will take about six gallons of alcohol to remove it.
I’m glad that I got sucked into taking down the wallpaper, instead of going out with a friend, because now I have an extra day just to clean the walls and remove the remaining wallpaper adhesive before I have to refinish the surfaces and prime them. I knew that this was going to be a week long project when I started, but I wasn’t expecting so much damage on the walls. I will really need that extra day.
So that’s what I’m doing with my spring break. Yay fun!
