Home Improvement Shows Lie About Wallpaper
I love my house. I really do. It is an older house, which means I will have plenty of opportunity to practice various home improvement skills. Which is a scary proposition, because I have very little in the way of innate home improvement skill. But I have tried, with varying levels of success. Instead of telling you all about how I tried to repair some cracks in the wall and instead learned that I am really horrible at sanding (there is a large piece of furniture in front of that area of my office now), I thought I would share a success story. And my success is also the hardest home improvement project I have done thus far, which I thought would be rather simple when we started but was in for a series of unpleasant surprises. In the interest of full disclosure, Kyle at Rather Be Shopping is giving away a brand new cordless drill if you share your story - and we need a drill. Ours died - it refuses to hold a charge for more than 8 seconds - and I have a number of things that need pilot holes drilled in them so I can hang them up. I often enter writing project competitions just because I like to answer people’s questions, but today, seriously… I want a drill. A lot.
The first project I ever did in this house was before we ever moved in - I repainted about 6 rooms in our ten room house. When we bought the house, most of the rooms were generally painted in colors we didn’t really like (my idea of our living room and office was not quite baby pink), and I didn’t think it would be a huge job to change that before we moved in. But there were two areas that would take a little more effort to alter because they had wallpaper - my son’s future room and the entryway. The entryway wallpaper isn’t exactly my taste, but it is innocuous enough and since it goes up the stairway, it two stories high in some places. Not being experienced in the ways of using scaffolding on a stairway, I decided it could just stay until I could hire someone to deal with it. But in my son’s room, the wallpaper had to go. Little blue flowers, that were already peeling off anyway, was not going to cut it. And the wallpaper was only on two of the four walls, and as I said, was already starting to peel off. How hard could it be to remove two walls of wallpaper, anyway?
Famous last words.
We took a trip to Home Depot, bought a lot of paint, primer, and wallpaper remover as well as scrapers. We got some advice on how to remove the wallpaper, and off we went. When we started, I was cheerful. The wallpaper truly did just peel right off the wall without us doing anything! Except it left behind this brown paper, for that surely wasn’t drywall…
The brown paper was the wallpaper backing and it truly was not my friend.
I soaked and scraped the backing, and in some areas it came off pretty well, and in some areas it seemed to come off a centimeter at a time. And this was still the first wall. It took a lot longer than expected, but it did eventually, over the course of the next week, come off. But again, this was just the first wall. For wall number two was just waiting with more fun surprises.
On wall number two, when we scraped off backing - it still wasn’t drywall we were seeing. It was more wallpaper. Even uglier wallpaper, in bad condition of course, and probably on the wall since 1970. And that wallpaper was stuck on like it had been cemented into the wall itself. Honestly, if I had more home improvement knowhow, I probably would have torn down all the drywall on that wall and put up new versus scraping off that old wallpaper. But we have no skill, so scrape we did. A month of going over to the house every night for a few hours, and we finally had all the wallpaper scraped off and the rooms all painted. I will never put up wallpaper in my house. I can’t even stand to think about it now.
A cute little side benefit to scraping off all that wallpaper though instead of tearing down the wallpaper is we found doodles from the early 70s on the wall that the little girl who was in that room originally drew. Pictures, stories about her family and friends, her obsession with the Partridge Family… it was all there. It was like a glimpse back in time to the mind of a preteen girl. And maybe that is why only that wall was originally wallpapered over…
Succeed we did though, and the room is all repainted a calming shade of blue with white trim, and happily contains my 3 year old son. And, as long as we own the house, will never have wallpaper again. Not even a border.
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April 11th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Been there. When I renovated my current apartment, in the hallway I scraped away around 6 layers of wallpaper. The inner layer originated from the time the apartment building was built, ca. 1930!
Good for me though was the fact that cement was expensive at the time, so it peeled away easily in many places. However, that process removed alot of the mortar. Alas, more sanding and finishing work….
April 11th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Great story.
Wallpaper should be illegal!
Mike
April 11th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I wish you had pictures to share of the early 70s doodles. I think they would be fun to see.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Funny to hear you talking about the 70’s as ancient history…I know it is, but to me, it seems like yesterday. My children grew up in the 70’s. But, I never did put funky wallpaper on the walls of my house!
April 11th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Oh Brandon - I do. lol
I will try to figure out how to put a few up this weekend
jinger - I feel like that when people talk about the 80’s like they happened 30 years ago…. oh wait, they almost did. lol
April 11th, 2008 at 9:20 am
In our first home, I hated the wallpaper in the (only) bathroom. There wasn’t a lot of it, but it was ugly. Having similar skills as you, I decided to do it myself.
About a week later, hubby and I surrendered. We brought in a professional, who ended up remodeling the ENTIRE bathroom.
I still tell that story…
April 11th, 2008 at 11:00 am
There’s actually one really really ugly wall in my sister’s bedroom where we had an extremely hard time removing the wallpaper and actually made a few gouges. That wall will probably need to be fixed before the house can be sold.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Second part to that…I just remembered. Don’t paint over wallpaper. There were about 3 layers of paint over this wallpaper, so it was all just a mess. But the paper was starting to come off in a spot so it really did have to come off. Just a horrible week.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Ewwww….I have bad memories of taking off wallpaper in one of my kids rooms, and it was just a little stip of wallpaper border but I swear it was cemented on and took hours to remove and ended up taking off the wall texturing and created a BIG headache, so I feel your pain.
Thanks for the story! You are officially entered to win the drill! Best of luck!
April 11th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Steamer, steamer. It’s the only way! Great story…:-)
April 11th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I’m with Mike - wallpaper should be illegal! We had a wall in our main bathroom where it came off in centimeter increments in parts.
In a couple of years, we’ll do the master bathroom. I’m already dreading taking that nasty, blue-and-yellow flowered, 1970’s wallpaper off! Oh, and we have carpet on the floor of the bathroom, too!
April 11th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
We’ve been in our house for about 10 years now living with the previous owner’s decorating taste in most rooms, circa mid 90’s. Not only is just about every room in our house circled with wallpaper border at ceiling height (chair rail height in some rooms too for extra accent — aren’t we lucky!), but the wallpaper border at ceiling height is then FRAMED with crown moulding top AND bottom! I’m absolutely dreading either tearing it apart and/or the bill for paying a professional to do it for us. Oy vey!
April 11th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I have wallpaper in my master bathroom that I cannot stand, it’s starting to peel, and I was justing asking my self this weekend how hard I think it would be to remove… good lord, you’re story makes it sound like I might as well just cut that room off the house and rebuild it anew
Good story, though..
April 11th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I just have to share this for all of you that need to peel wall paper. Mix some fabric softner and water together in a spray bottle and soak the Wall paper with it and it works better than anything I have ever used.
Of course I discoverd this near the end of a nightmare wallpaper removal project (painted over wallpaper on unprimed drywall), and when I used the fabric sofner mixture the walls didn’t get ripped or dinged at all, it was so much easier.
April 12th, 2008 at 9:32 am
wallpaper should indeed be illegal.
if you ever buy another house with wallpaper in it (why? why would you do that?), rent a steamer. it will make your life much easier, even though the idea of renting equipment sounds like a money pit. i’ve worked with wallpaper a few times in my housepainting career and commercial solvents just don’t hack it!
April 13th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
OMG…this is hilarious! Mine is also about wallpaper!!
I’m with the “Make Wallpaper Illegal” crowd. Why oh why would anyone want to glue that stuff on the walls?
April 14th, 2008 at 8:56 am
I can definitely relate. I’m in the process of re-wallpapering the 4th room in my 78-year-old house. The walls are in rough shape, so wallpaper hides a lot.
Hey, the WORST thing is painting, only to have the paint “lift up” a short time later, the you finally figure out it’s because a previous homeowner PAINTED OVER wallpaper! talk about a lot of work.
I wouldn’t bother with wallpaper remover. I use a scouring tool to rub over the walls which inserts tiny holes in the paper, then use a damp sponge over the walls to soften it up. Who wants to breathe in toxic chemicals?
April 14th, 2008 at 8:57 am
oh, 1 more thing….
if you do it right, you should paint a wall with special wallpaper primer before applying the paper. It makes the wallpaper peel off much more easily, without leaving the brown backing behind, when, down the road, you want to remove it.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
When we bought our house, one of the bedrooms had horribly peeling wallpaper (with uglier wallpaper underneath) and really dirty carpet. No problem, we thought, we’ll just redo this room before we move our office furniture in.
It took a month and a half to get all the wallpaper off - 3 of the walls were unprimed drywall underneath. And we destroyed all the baseboards and the window trim in the process.
And then it turned out that there was a second layer of carpet… and underneath the carpet wasn’t cement floor, like we thought, it was actually gray asphalt tile underneath all that nasty adhesive.
And it was only at that point that we found out that none of the outlets in that room were grounded. It would have been easier and faster to rip down the walls and replace them.
Fortunately, the only other room in our house with floor-to-ceiling wallpaper is the kitchen… and when we redo that (someday), we WILL be ripping down the walls first.