Wallpaper Woes

Wallpaper: Faint-Hearted Need Not Apply nor Remove

Well if you haven’t noticed by many of the photos, references, and notes in my renovation journal from my last post, we had more wallpaper than a wallpaper factory in this house. Okay, that’s an exaggeration but my goodness, there was a lot of wallpaper! And when you’re in the throws of the excitement of buying a house, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that it won’t be that big of a deal to get rid of something that’s a huge pain in the patootie to get rid of! Disclaimer: for those of you that don’t hate wallpaper, maybe even like it, I’m sorry if this post offends. To each his own and I suppose plenty of people do like it because hey, they make the stuff for some reason. And I do have to admit that I too have been guilty of applying the nasty stuff myself, long, long ago. But I blame that on my youth and the 80’s! Wallpaper application isn’t any easier than removal is so I really don’t know what the original owners of this house were thinking. I mean maybe an accent wall here and there would have been fine but nearly every wall in this house was covered! Maybe they had stock in a wallpaper company, yeah, maybe that’s it! But no, it was really just a love for true Victorian design that drove them to commit such a heinous crime against the next owners of this home; yep, that would be us!

And allow me to establish now that not all wallpaper is created equal when it comes to removal. At one point, I went from room to room sample stripping each paper just to see how difficult it was going to be to remove! I can tell you for example that while the foyer paper’s first layer came off easily, it left behind a second fuzzy layer that had to be soaked and scraped to get off. (I found a recipe on Pinterest that used fabric softener, Dawn, water, and vinegar for this and it worked great.) The guest bedroom paper was very much the same. And the second layer came off pretty easy, but it was a messy process! The kitchen paper was horrible to remove. Only little bits at a time would come off and it had to be soaked with a vinegar water solution because the above mentioned recipe was a bit too slimy for this particular paper. It definitely took the longest to remove. The sitting room and dining room were not much better and I absolutely hated those rooms because the original owners had painted stripes on the walls where the wallpaper seams were and the paper did not want to release from those painted areas at all!

The master bedroom wasn’t horrible and we definitely got a reprieve in both offices where only borders had been applied. I got so good with my removal skills that I could actually start “reading” the wallpaper. I had certain wrist movements when scraping that allowed me to get maximum scraping efficiency for a particular type of paper and I got to where I could just “tell” what pieces would come up with which technique by looking at the edges. What an amazing skill set I developed that I never want to use again! Oh, except for the one small bathroom that we haven’t yet renovated, ugh!

Oh, not sure I’ve mentioned it but yeah, the renovation is on-going people! As I type this sentence, Warren is up in our master bath finishing up the shower area tile. He’d be further along today had I not gotten the idea to create a little cabinet in the half-wall next to the toilet to house TP rolls and the toilet brush! That’s what I do to him all the time…constantly coming up with new ideas and he sweetly says “Well if that’s what you want, now’s the time to do it!” Heart of gold that man has!

Oh and if you were lucky enough to visit early on, like my mom-in-law Joan, you were put to work helping to scrape wallpaper. It’s just the way we rolled those days!

Thank goodness there was only one room in the house that the original owners felt compelled to put paper on the ceiling! Our “laundry to guest bath” had that spectacular charm applied to it!

In short, I hate wallpaper! I keep seeing these Pinterest and Facebook posts about wallpaper being cool again and how it’s making its comeback. Even Joanna Gaines applied wallpaper in the last episode of Fixer Upper I watched (although gonna go out on a limb and guess she wasn’t the one that actually had to apply it!) Well no more wallpaper for Annabelle’s Place! A long time from now, God willing, someone else will have this house and there’s no way I will ever bequeath even a single strip of wallpaper to another poor soul! Paint, now paint is a beautiful thing! Thanks for allowing me to vent…carry on! {Shelley}