I have defeated you, you son of a bitch! You sheathed yourself in six (6!) individual layers of wallpaper, the final layer of which was some unholy giant sticker of a layer that was used as a friggin’ adhesive. Your previous owner never scraped a single damn layer off to apply the next godforsaken pattern of shitty flowers, slowly shrinking the room into some bizarre, drawn-out claustrophobic torture chamber of ugliness. But now, your white plaster walls have been lain bare, and I can begin painting.
Right after I remove all the adhesive, plaster over all the nicks and scrapes and gaping holes, sand the whole motherfucker down, repeat those last two steps one more time, and then prime it. Fuuuuuuuuuu…
Wow. You wouldn’t have happened to have documented the process, would you? Taken pictures of what each layer of paper looked like, like a rogue’s gallery of crappy decorating? 'Cause that would be cool.
6 layers, cripes. I’d be ready to rip down the drywall before trying to deal with that I think.
Sort of. I’ll see if I can recover some pictures from my iPhone. But in all actuality (as I reveal the bit of exaggeration in the OP), a few of those layers were just remnants. And two of the biggest layers were pretty well fused together. Unfortunately, it was plaster - otherwise I probably would have pulled it out. The amount of steam and DIF I used would most likely have destroyed drywall casing.
When we were looking at houses, ugly paint didn’t faze us at all, but we were NOT interested in a house that had wallpaper top to bottom. You have my sympathies, Munch.
I’m having flashbacks to the week before we moved into this house. My brother, my old roommate and her boyfriend removed the wallpaper in the living room and dining room and then painted. Soooo not fun. I need to repaint sometime soon.
Our house in Portsmouth VA was originally built in 1919 as military officers housing - Craddock was apparently one of the first planned communities.
There was literally a quarter inch of paint on the trim in the kitchen, we peeled off a chip that had about 20 layers of identifiable paint. On the floor was the original linseed based linoleum, and 4 more layers of varying layers of flooring.
Ugh – the pricks who lived here before us painted over the wallpaper in the hallway. And that’s not even the worst thing they did.
-Nailing down the dining room carpet. (Not using carpet tacks – I’m talking big, huge spikes.)
-Hooking up the ceiling fan in the living room so that it ran through a sort of tunnel in the ceiling and had to be plugged in. WTF?
-For some reason, the hot and cold taps in the kitchen were reversed. (Although I was told that might have been before they moved in, before right-cold, left-hot was standardized)
-None of the upstairs bedrooms had doors. Again, WTF?
That’s all I can remember at the moment. Complete and utter dumbasses.
My house lies… it’s bad enough that it has popcorn walls, but that was applied over several layers of wallpaper. At least since the walls themselves are brick, if I decide to attack one or more rooms I know I can steam it until I feel like a boiled shrimp.
You’re lucky… the people who lived in my house before me painted over wallpaper… badly (you could still see the red flowers faintly through the Carribbean Blue paint.
What was the worst though, is that whoever built the house was lazy, and didn’t put their coat of sizing or whatever it’s called down completely on the drywall.
So when I went to remove the old wallpaper in preparation to paint (it was peeling off in places, and generally cruddy looking), I got off most of it, except in spots, where the paper was literally glued straight to the drywall, which meant that I ripped up big amounts of the drywall paper in the process.
When my grandmom’s house was set afire by hobos, I spent the better part of a summer with a crowbar and sledgehammer tearing down what was left. In the kitchen I came across layer after layer of wallpaper, one on top of the next, going back about 7 layers or so. This was the house she’d been born in and my dad too. So I collected page-sized samples as best I could, put them in a scrapbook and gave it to my dad. He 'bout teared up looking at those long-forgotton old patterns that he’d not seen since he was a kid in the '30s. Some went back even further to when the house was built around 1880.
My MIL is a serial wallpaperer. They’ve been in the house 40 years and the layers she has shellacked on the walls over this time period is frightening. In every farking room. About every 18 months the entire house gets re-papered and nothing ever farking matches. She’ll by the border at one place on sale and kinda find a match in wall paper if it was someone who was on LSD picking it out.
When she dies and the house goes on the market, I really feel sorry for the poor bastard who will be dealing with the wall paper issue.
I hate wallpaper.
When I was a kid, we moved. Our new house had some hideous living room wallpaper. That seventies-orange shade, with a sort of velour texture, except where various little patterns were etched in. My parents were not looking forward to removing it. So one Saturday they got out their tools, and started to remove it.
Which is when they discovered that the wallpaper was just scotch-taped to the wall.
If only the rest of the renovations were that easy.
Carl, it was on the north side of Ft. Worth, Haltom City, and while once out in the country, the area that grew up around it turned kinda seedy. A railroad line was just across the creek from the place. When Grandmom got into her 70s and Grandad was gone, she moved into town next to her daughter and rented the place out to people the church identified as needing help. Invariably they took advantage of her with non payment of rent, taking things when they moved out, etc. Eventually some tennant trashed it to the point it needed too much repair and then the RR hobos moved in. Dad caught them once and made them leave. The next day the place caught fire.
My other peeve (other than wallpaper) is people who spackle things, don’t sand properly, then paint over it (again and again) so that it’s really difficult to get the lumpy area right now.