Friday, February 03, 2006

Since it seems a lot of family and friends are doing home renovations lately, I thought I might share a tip, for those of you who don't know it already.

I mix equal parts warm water and liquid fabric softener in a spray bottle and spray it on the wallpaper first. I let it sit for a minute or two then it comes off much easier. You may want to score the wallpaper first. You can buy a little doohickey for that, but since I misplaced mine I have just been using the corner of a putty knife instead. Plus, I don't have to switch tools when I scrape.

Our last house had wallpaper in almost every room and wallpaper borders in every single room (and yes, even on top of the wallpaper) so we kinda became pros at removing it, covering it and panting it. I can now officially say I hate wallpaper. Funny, I still wallpapered the kitchen at the new place.

Well, it doesn't always look bad. We had wallpaper over old plaster in the old dining room and if we had stripped the 10 or so layers off, I think the walls would have came with it. So instead we primed it first with an adhesive primer and then painted over it. The wallpaper actually had a little texture to it so it really matched the kind of plantation style we were going for. I tried to find a picture where you could see the texture close-up but I coudn't find one. But here are some before and after shots just for fun.

Dining room before (in back ground) and after:

I know I look like crap and all, but give me some slack, it was moving day.

Here is main bathroom before and after. That took A LOT of elbow grease, let me tell you! The blue stuff on the bottom half of the walls was some kind of sticky wallpaper/cushion flooring stuff. Weird.

I tried to add more pics of different rooms but my computer will not cooperate.

2 comments:

Lesley said...

Awesome b & a pictures! It's nice to see that Mom and I aren't the only Martha Stewarts out there, although I think Monica's in denial, remember the diaper cake?
Mom and Dad have done some huge renos to their house, they built a wall to divide the kitchen/living room, built a walk-in closet in the guest room and did a total room makeover in the bar room.
Keep up the good decorating!

Anonymous said...

Yes, Monica's diaper cake was pretty impressive.

No, I havn't uncovered any Care Bear murals, however our kitchen at the old place was a mess. We tore off the wallpaper to find old wood panels with huge sections cut out & repaired with cardboard & duct tape. We couldn't afford to gyprock the entire room so we (actually, just me) bought wallpaper on clearance for $1 a roll, re-wallpapered and then painted over that.. primer plus 2 coats. It was cheaper than buying nice wallpaper for such a big room although it was a lot of work. But no one ever knew what was underneath when it was done.

You never know what you will uncover. Once we came across a room that had over 15 layers of old wallpaper underneath...maybe more...but 15 that we could tell for sure.