The Scraping Continues

I have finally scrounged the motivation to continue the wallpaper scraping in our bedroom and since it's a holiday weekend I'm dragging Chris down with me.  Since the last scraping extravaganza, we acquired a Paper Pirana (similar to Paper Tiger, but instead hunts in schools?) and also assembled the garden sprayer correctly, so instead of stripping with mostly tears as a solvent, the wallpaper stripper was delivered consistently and evenly to the paper.  I naively thought that this would make the stripping go much easier PLUS with the added benefit of an extra person this room would be finished in no time!

I don't know why I never learn.

There's too much paper on these walls for them to be easy regardless of methods or tools.  The stripping continued using this method:  1.  Dry scrape the vinyl paper and paint and (could it be?) skimcoating material until you can't stop muttering expletives.  2.  Score the remaining paint paper and joint compound and hopefully top layer of paper paper with the PP until the deltoid muscles on both arms ache.  3.  Soak scored paper with bad for the environment, cancer causing wallpaper stripping solution.  4.  Drink beer and sing along to various singer-songwriters from the 70's.  5.  Scrape.  6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 until the plaster is clean.   7.  Clean up the giant mess.

Sounds great, eh?  Generally we got about 1.5 layers of wallpaper off with each scraping.  I've been telling anyone who will listen how there's no good reason to strip wallpaper as long as it has a sound bond with the wall surface.  Well, I found a good reason.  Stripping one layer from a room this size probably wouldn't even take a whole day, stripping 4 or 5 may take the rest of my life.  OK, not really.  We worked hard yesterday and it's probably 2/3rds finished, but the joy of wallpaper stripping is that you never really know how it's going to go.  In the same room you could spend an hour working on a 2 sf section and then zip through a whole wall.  I'm remaining positive about the work we have to do today, it's going to be the easy kind... I'm sure of it.

Feeling Down? Scrape!

Things around here haven't been great, I try to remind myself that there are a lot of people who are worse off than us right now, but on days like today I just let myself wallow in self pity.  I lost my job a couple of months ago and I thought this would be an ideal time to get back into the swing of things working on the house.  This would be especially useful if we are forced to sell it due to unemployment, but since nobody is buying houses in Albany or anywhere else for that matter, that's not really an issue.  So, unemployment began and there was a week or two where I was decompressing and making calls and I wasn't ready to start house work then.  Then my sister got married and we had to travel so that ate up two weeks what with all of the packing and laundry and planning and then unpacking and laundry and recovering from too much cake and booze.  Then right on the heels of the wedding, we had to travel to MI for some godparent duties for my niece and nephew, so that's another two weeks especially considering that I caught a nasty chest cold the week before.  I made a miraculous recovery in time for the 4 hour Easter vigil and then we drove back home and the chest cold returned.  Then the cold turned into something much more nefarious... pneumonia, so I'm unemployed and had to pay a gajillion dollars in copays for emergency medical care and regular doctor visits and prescriptions.  THEN, as I started to feel like death was no longer imminent, came our 5th wedding anniversary and the party that we have been planning for months complete with out of town houseguests, AND I developed thrush.  The party was fun for everyone, but my mouth hurt and I was exhausted and I just wanted to go home.  Anyway, that's a really long and boring way of saying that now that I've been unemployed for nearly two full months, I'm ready to get my teeth into a project.  

SO... I waited until it is 90 degrees and the house is hotter than outside and I am working on scraping the wallpaper in the bedroom.  Last summer, I peeled away most of the top layers of paint and paper, there are posts about it, but now I'm actually getting down to plaster and committed to finishing it.  On the advice of a friend who has a beautiful Dutch colonial I'm using something called DIF.  On the front of the bottle it says, "The only one that actually works".  How's that for a slogan?  Maybe if I put something like that on my resume I would actually get some calls.  Anyway, you put it in a garden sprayer and then cover everything in the room with it including yourself and then wait 15 minutes and viola!  layers of paper peel away like magic.  That is... if magic feels a lot like regular old elbow grease.

Slave Labor

When we returned from Michigan we brought along two slaves... er... small family members.  We told my sister (their mother) that we were going to have a great time hiking and camping and toasting marshmallows.  LIES!  She should know that we don't do anything fun!  We just scrape!

On a whim I started stripping the wallcover in the master bedroom.  One morning I was lying in bed just waking up.  Sunlight was streaming in the windows highlighting all of the overlapped seams on all of the layers of wallpaper under the 3 or 4 layers of paint.  I started thinking that if I took the metal nail file from the nightstand drawer and stuck it under the uppermost wallpaper seam that I could peel the paper right off and finally see what's under there.  I've been yearning to see what I could see since we moved in but when we moved into this house I vowed that I would not start a new project until the previous project is finished.  In our last house every room was a work zone and it was miserable.  Chris reminds me of this rule whenever I talk about starting something new.  Also, the kitchen project from last summer remains approximately 99% complete and I've already broken the rule to work on the living room.  Anyway, I grabbed that metal file and stuck it under one of the wallpaper seams, wiggled it around, and then pulled.  I was delighted by what I found:

Pretty yellow paper!  The paint and a layer of what I think is probably a vinyl wallpaper installed within the last 30 years was coming up beautifully leaving this yellow paper behind.  Chris was unhappy when he discovered what I was up to.  In fact, he said, "I will never understand you", but when he saw the yellow paper he began to understand.  

Then when the kids found out what I was doing they wanted to get in on the peeling action themselves.  It didn't hurt that this is the only air conditioned room in the house.
Maddy was particularly entertained by the wallpaper peeling and she stayed for the long haul.  She really enjoyed when the yellow paper started peeling away too allowing the even older papers to show through.

Here's the chronology of what's on the walls in our bedroom.  This pink paper is installed on bare plaster.

This striped floral is installed over the pink.

The yellow and grey floral is installed over the striped floral and the vinyl paper is over that.  It looks like the vinyl paper was blue, but was primed before they painted the room, so I can't see if there was a pattern on the paper.

So, I guess I've gotten myself into another project.  We knew this was coming, you can't keep painting over wallpaper indefinitely.  I'll just keep my fingers crossed that we can get the paper off and leave the plaster intact.