First project: wallpaper removal

At last, I think I'm finally in order enough to start posting about our projects and transformations around the house. We did our big move on Saturday, enlisting the help of three friends. Fortunately, our apartment building has a freight elevator, and so the only stairs we had to take were at the house itself. We picked up the truck at 8:30 and got right to work. We barely made everything work into our 16' truck, but after some Tetris-like packing, made it work. We were done unloading the truck by 1 pm or so.

So, onto the projects! These projects are by no means complete. I think the list just keeps getting longer. At this point, we each have things on our to do list each day. Since I work in the evenings, I spend my days getting ready for my class, then doing various projects. Nick gets home by 6 pm or so, and so he occupies his evenings with various things. The big project for me this week is getting as unpacked and settled in as possible, as we have our first houseguest this weekend! Nick's cousin Drew is coming into town for a couple of nights and has the honor of being the first visitor to stay the night here.

But, I thought I'd go back a couple of weeks and start with our first weekend of homeownership. We got right to work the Saturday after our closing. After a trip to Lowe's, we got right to work getting rid of the wallpaper borders in my office and the guest bedroom.

My office. Ugly '80s wallpaper border on the top, and blue and magenta trim throughout.

Here's a detail of the border. Yuck. I do not abide this.

Here's the guest bedroom, from the doorway. It was a toddler's room before we moved in. The bunny and sheep border was already peeling off a bit. It was much easier to remove than the office border that was surely up for 20 years or so.

First things first: scoring the wallpaper.

See all the little pockmarks? Courtesy of my Piranha scorer. Poor bunny, he doesn't know what's coming.

Next step: spraying the wallpaper remover. You can make your own solution out of vinegar and water, but I've read this remover is more efficient. The scores throughout allow the remover to seep in and dissolve the glue holding it to the wall.

Nick, hard at work. The simple combination of the scoring and remover was not enough in the office. This wallpaper was OLD and very stuck to the wall. We ended up peeling off the top layer of paper, and then had to use a wallpaper scraper and a putty knife to get the backing off the wall after soaking it with the remover. I didn't take photos in the middle of this, unfortunately. We had to scrape it off as carefully as possible so as not to harm the wall. We did take off a few chunks of the top layer of the wall, but went back and spackled it later.

So, here's the office before:

And after:This photo shows some of the holes from scraping off the top layer of the wall with the wallpaper.

I did nothing in this room except score the wallpaper. I was in the office, scraping off the wallpaper backing while Nick came in and tore this one right down. Nice work, Nick!

Here's before:

And after:

These rooms look nothing like this now! I'll be posting about the painting projects in a separate post. After removing the wallpaper, we had to wash the walls with Tri Sodium Phosphate, then wash that off with warm water. After that dried, we were ready to tape, then paint. Even though all of these steps were a bit tedious, we really wanted to do it right the first time so that we wouldn't have to go back and redo anything after moving the furniture in.

More to come soon!