Stripping Wallpaper is Fun! Or something….

Today saw the end of the metal support structure for the ceiling, and all of the lag bolt anchors installed in the ceiling to hold up the support structure. Jenny helped me to get the metal bits into a big trashcan outside the side window, to which we will later affix a big sign for the trash people saying, “Warning: Sharp Pointy Bits Inside.” It was too wet to try to get the old ceiling tiles outside, so those are still sitting in the room. I need to get those out before I can easily work on removing the last bit of the drop ceiling structure, which are the L-shaped pieces that wrap around the wall that supported the outside edges of the support structure. Removing that support band was one of the painful parts in the dining room, mostly because I didn’t have the right tools. Fortunately, someone got us the great little pry-bar that we had on our registry for the wedding, so this should be somewhat easier.

After removing the metal pieces, Jenny was anxious to start ripping-down the wallpaper. She has been hating the wallpaper since probably before we were married. After the wedding, she was living with the paper all the time, and it really got to her. Other people’s old tobacco stains, shadows from old pictures, bleh.. It was a mess. Well, today, she got her wish. We ripped-off 95% of the wallpaper. There’s one sheet that we couldn’t remove yet because I hadn’t removed the old 1960’s shelving support rails, so that will have to wait for later.

While removing the current wallpaper, we found that about 2/3 of the room still has a very old wallpaper underneath it. Oddly, about 1/3 of the room was cleaned down to the plaster before the current wallpaper was installed, just like the dining room. I have no easy way to explain this. On one short piece of wall, one can see where that stripping effort stopped, but there doesn’t seem to be a good explanation for why it stopped. Maybe the 2/3 of the room with paper were in good enough shape to take the new paper without any preparation? I have no idea why they stopped stripping, but that’s going to increase the amount of time we need to spend on the wall preparation. I was hoping that the walls were going to be nice and already prepared for us under that top layer of wallpaper, but, sadly, that is not the case. So, we’ll be doing a bunch of wallpaper stripping on whole walls, instead of the hoped-for stripping only on the top of the walls. Oh well. It is only one layer, so it shouldn’t be so bad.

Now we’re starting to think a bit about paint. We had originally figured on gold to match the gold in the window and to make the room brighter than the green in the dining room. However, after uncovering that old wallpaper, it is somehow serene and fitting in the room. So, now I have a quandary. I don’t know what I want to do yet. Jenny still likes the idea of the gold. I’d love to get a good idea of what the actual colors were in the old wallpaper, and maybe use one of those. I don’t know why it seems to work with the window, either, but it does. Argh. This is one of those things that is probably going to drive me nuts.

Pictures of the ceiling demo work.  I guess I considered this just a continuation of yesterday. 🙂

– jonathan