The First Project

The dining room had wallpaper. Apparently wallpaper can be difficult to remove. It becomes exponentially more difficult with each additional layer. Our house was built in 1972. There were 4 layers of wallpaper in the dining room. Thus, wallpaper styles seem to have a shelf life of approximately 9 years. Peeling through the stratigraphy of our wallpaper was like a little tour through the past 3 decades of wallpaper technology and style. The top layer wasn't really all that obtrusive. Each subsequent example of wallpaper became more and more disturbing. I bet the bottom layer really made some people lose their appetites in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner.

Well, here's our initial attempt to remove this evil stuff. We tried it all: steamer, water, fabric softener, yelling at the wallpaper, DIF wallpaper remover, scoring, scraping. This first picture represents a couple hours of work. Suffice it to say we were ill-prepared. Our scrapers were awful and we had no idea what we were doing.

Just looking at this picture makes my scraping hand hurt. If anyone asks you to help them remove wallpaper (and you don't foresee yourself asking them to return the favor anytime soon) politely - and in words of your own choosing - tell them to shove off.

The more we worked on this job, the more we hated wallpaper...but also the work became easier. Matt's suggestion to "paint" the DIF on worked quite well and sped things up. The picture above shows most of the wallpaper removed. Sometimes Erika and I, in our wallpaper-removing excitement, would dig a little bit into the wallboard. To make sure the finished wall looked nice and smooth I spread joint compound over the rough patches. After it dried I sanded it all down so most of it looked smooth. You can see how excited we were to get rid of this stuff by the amount of joint compound now on the wall.


Finally, here's the near-finished product. Sure, it's only primer, but it's in a tint similar to what it will eventually look like. Erika and Mom/Lindley matched the color to one of our Ceramica plates. We removed the trim to see if it would be easier to paint it outside the room - we'll see if it helps!

So far this has been a nice, manageable job. It finally appears as if we are getting things done!