The Remodels Never End

This week, a room remodel has made Kate a very dull girl. If you don't know about our massive remodeling projects, then you don't read this blog ofen enough, see Our New House.

I've been pretty much tackling a room a month, and I have completed the sunroom and the living room, so only nine more rooms to go.

This month we're taking on Kaydn Rye's room. I knew it was going to be a big project, what with layers upon layers of layers of wallpaper to remove, plastering, floor scraping, sanding and painting, I knew it was going to be a big job. For some odd reason, everyone who has ever lived in this house has thought that rather than actually finishing the walls, which were never actually finished with any kind of texturing, they would just wallpaper over wallpaper over wallpaper. And with our house being built around the turn-of-the century, it was definitely a lot of wallpaper. Actually the people we bought the house from didn't even bother with putting up new wallpaper, they just pained over the wallpaper that was there and put up a new wallpaper border. I never really understood the concept of wallpaper border, but whatever. Every single room in this house had a border when we moved in, from topiaries shaped like bunnies to actual bunnies to chickens to monkeys. Yeah, that's right, I said monkeys. We actually have a bedroom upstairs with monkey border.

So anyway, yesterday I had some friends come over and we began literally scraping the walls. I didn' take any pictures during our work day because we were looking pretty rough. Bu here's the after photo. We spent an entire day scraping and this is all we got accomplished.





We found at least five layers of wallpaper, a couple layers of actual paint, some plaster, and then the actual wall. There was the puky-yellowish wallpaper, the snake skin wallpaper, and the 1920s flowery wallpaper, among others. It was a mess and it was terrible. It'll take me weeks to even get to the point of replastering. And then I have to strip the floors. Who in the world paints hardwood floors? That just seems blasphemous.

When we moved in, the previous owners had painted the wallpaper a pinky-red and had put up palm tree wallpaper border, oh, all that was complemented by the forest green paint on the hardwood. It was horrific.

And to get the wallpaper off I tried the whole "removing wallpaper with vinegar and newspaper" trick. For the life of me I couldn't get the newspapers to stay on the wall though, so we ended up just spraying the walls down with vinegar. You're supposed to be able to dip newspapers in one part vinegar and three parts water, put them on the wall, and let them sit on the wall for an hour, after you've scored the wallpaper first, of course. The newspaper only stayed on for about ten minutes, but it did help a little. I was thinking that to get the rest of the wallpaper off I might keep spraying the newspapers with vinegar after I get them on the wall. Maybe that might help.

So I figure that by the time January rolls around I should have the room completed. Right now Kaydn Rye is living in the monkey room, poor thing.



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