I’m still alive! A lot has happened since I last posted, Ali and I did a ton of work on the house and then got married plus I brought another Mazda into the family. I’ll get to all of that, but first I want to talk to you about quite possibly one of the greatest modern evils we face today: wallpaper.
It turns out that when people say planning a wedding is hard, they aren’t lying. Since we had the wedding at our house we needed to get the place wedding ready, which means a ton of work. The least fun projects were the ones involving wallpaper. Stripping wallpaper is seriously the worst home project, it’s labor and time intensive and at the end of it all you’ve done is get the wall back to a starting place that you can then patch and paint.
So lets get to the pictures shall we? I don’t seem to have any decent pictures of how our living room looked before we started work but you can get a pretty good idea from the pictures. This was shortly after starting, you can see I’ve got a small bit of wallpaper stripped.
We quickly learned to soak the outer layer, peel it off, soak the inner layer, and peel that off. It works pretty well but having a scrapper on hand makes things a little easier for those stubborn spots. We bought a little Zinsser PaperTiger but found it next to useless, all of our wallpaper comes off just fine when soaked in water.
Once you get going it can come down pretty fast, especially once you get into the groove and get a feel for how much you need to soak each layer. That said, the pictures above was about 2 hours of after-work fun. Below you can see what about 3 days of 2 or so hours each day gets you.
Over the weekend following the start of this fun I was able to take all of the wallpaper in the section behind the TV down as well as some on the wall near the room Ali has claimed as her office. Ali started to join the fun as well, unfortunately the wall she was working on had some water damage that the wallpaper had been covering so we didn’t see it before.
We’ve since fixed that damage but I’ll cover that in another post. It took about 2 months of on and off work (you go crazy staring at walls all day) just to get the wallpaper all down but we had that part wrapped up in time for New Years. Below you can see the area I’ve claimed for my computer.
As I said, this was a lot of on and off as I had other projects to work on and I really wasn’t a big fan of taking down wallpaper. We did spend the majority of our house work time the week before New Years on getting the last of the wallpaper down and making sure we had washed the adhesive off the walls. Essentially, we prepped our living room for paint but didn’t get around to actually painting.
I was also able to run some stereo wiring through some holes someone had already drilled in the floor (WHY!?) and my heating ducts.
With everything set up we went ahead and had a nice New Years gaming bash! Some interesting choices were made in the wiring of this house, but it held up to 5 TVs and 5 PS4’s all at the same time so I can’t fault it too much.
A few days after that I convinced Timmy to help me pick up a new desk, which looks much better than the old one and generals jives better with the feel of the house.
So that’s it for the wallpaper stuff as far as our living room is concerned. I’ve got a ton of other areas of the house that I’ll cover separately that also include a ton of wallpaper take down but this is the largest room we’ve had to remove wallpaper from. We have done a ton of other stuff as I mentioned earlier; we went to the Climate March in April, it snowed a lot and I found out that shoveling a double lot on a corner sucks, and then Spring started to roll around and we got to find out what plants we’ve got around our house. Now it’s damn near Fall, funny how that works.
Anyway, I’ll let you get back to doing whatever it is you do when you’re not here reading about all the stuff I’ve broken. See you next time!
Oh yeah! That new Mazda? It’s another 3… sort of.