Day 3 - More Wallpaper

So...Cass and I will never...EVER...put up wallpaper in our house unless we are absolutely sure that we will never have to take it down ourselves! It is kind of a pain. On Sunday, we went to church and decided we'd head on over to the house afterward to do a little more wallpaper removal. We're still pumped about getting it all off the walls so that we can hopefully start painting this weekend.

I went ahead and got started on removing the rest of the wallpaper in the master bath. That probably took me about an hour. The bathroom is small and kind of awkward because the shower and the toilet are the only things in the room and the room is probably 6' x 6' square, roughly. The sink and vanity are separate, outside the bathroom.


After getting most of that done, Cass and I left to go have dinner with her parents since it was Mother's day and we hadn't seen them in a while. We drove out to Highland Township and had dinner with Mom, Dad, Chad, and Cooper. That was fun. Since it was an early dinner and we left the restaurant at 5pm, we decided we'd go back and remove the wallpaper in the Kitchen.


Before we tore it all down, the border in the kitchen had a bunch of fruit on it. This border was the same kind of wallpaper as what was in the master bedroom, it came down in two layers. Luckily, by then I was starting to get the hang of how to remove this stuff! We were able to get all the wallpaper borders down in less than half the time it took to get the bedroom wallpaper down. We had probably got about a quarter of the border down when Cass got a phone call from a friend and 15 minutes later when she came back, I was about 3/4 of the way done with the border. It was funny.

Then, it was time to start taking down the wallpaper below the chair moulding around the room. We took all the chair molding out and decided we'd try to leave the base board moudling on since it was kinda difficult to remove without damaging it. After we finally got that going we were able to take it down pretty fast, too. Now all that's left in terms of wallpaper is the sheets of wallpaper, like what was below the chair moulding, behind the appliances. We might actually get to wash walls and paint this weekend after all!

P.S. These tools are definitely essential for removing wallpaper. (Emphasis on the bandaids though. That scraper's sharp! OUCH! >.<)

Day 2 of the Renovations!

Today was pretty mild in terms of what Cass and I did to the house. Today's weather was a little unpredictable so we weren't sure about how much we'd be able to do outside, but I did get the majority of the millions of leaves raked in the backyard and I even got to mow the lawn in backyard. It was a little hard to believe that I was mowing my own grass. MY OWN GRASS! *^_^* That'll take a few weeks to get used to! :-) It really needed it, too. If you can tell by looking at that picture with the wood barrel next to the matted down grass, you'll see what I mean.

We also moved some random stuff from our apartment's office to the house. Nothing too exciting there, but it sure makes it feel like we're really doing it. We really are moving into our own home soon. I can tell it's going to take a few weeks for that to finally sink in.

After coming back from eating lunch at the apartment, we decided to start taking on the battle of removing the, dare i say, hideous wallpaper borders in our master suite. First there was the teddy bear border in the walk-in closet. Cass and I agreed that we should start there to sort of familiarize ourselves with how to take down wallpaper since both of us had minimal to no experience doing this. What was great was the paper came down after soaking it for 15 minutes. We didn't even have to score the paper or anything. Best part was that it just came down all in one piece.

This got us fired up and ready to take on the flowery bedroom border. It came down eventually, but nowhere near as easily. We had to score the snot out of the border, soak it a good 3 times and take it down in two layers. The outward design material was a sort of vinyl sheet over top of a paper adhesive layer.

So, we took down the outer layer of the paper which took us probably 30-40 minutes. If you could get a good grip on a solid area of the border, you could get it to come down in fairly long strips.

The paper adhesive layer though? Yeah that took more like 1.5-2 hours. We had to soak it again, and it was really hard to get long strips to come off at one time because with the border being wet to release the adhesive, the paper became real week and brittle so it just fell apart when you tried to pull it away from the wall. Eventually, we got the whole thing, except for the master bath, done. Tomorrow will probably be another day of removing wallpaper in some other rooms and maybe mowing the front lawn! Woot!