On New Year's Day, We Peeled Wallpaper

Oh, did you think we were only peeling the master bedroom walls in December 2011 and January 2012?  :) No, we were also working on the living room and dining room.  That is about all we were doing, all the time.  The top photo shows the dining room and the bottom two show the living room.  These New Year's Day (January 1, 2012) photos show that several walls in both rooms are well along.  We still had to tackle the yellow underlay in most places.  Also, at this point, we didn't have a good way to tackle the higher areas of wallpaper, as ladders are unstable for such work.  So there was a lot of wallpaper left higher up.

A Wood Floor for the Studio

While the de-wallpapering (deflowering?) was going on, we were busy with other things.  Almost as soon as we closed on the house in mid-December, Jamie began laying a floor in the garage room that was to become my art studio.

Here is the garage room before the flooring.  This is taken standing at the back of the room, looking toward the front of the garage building -- the house is opposite, beyond the door.  There is an ugly kind of green tile or linoleum floor.  Jamie has removed the baseboards so he can lay a new floor.  You can see his pile of laminate flooring and subsurface material.

Here is the beautiful new flooring.  In later photos I will show the whole studio.

The Wallpaper Wars Begin in the Master Bedroom

We started in the master bedroom because we figured we'd have to have somewhere to sleep, and it would be hard to do this room once we'd moved in.  (We didn't know when we started whether we'd be able to finish all the walls before we had to move in.)  Above is the rose madness that we faced in the bedroom.

Here you can see me at work peeling some wallpaper while Jamie takes a photo.  The "yellow" wall behind the wallpaper was another layer of stuff we had to remove.  Jamie did most of this work in December during the week while I was in Houston.  Here's another photo of me at work on the master bedroom:

We finished wallpaper removal on January 15, 2012.  I described it in an email:  "We finished stripping all the wallpaper from the main bedroom and Jamie has been getting it ready for painting.  The wallpaper removal is a two-step process. First you have to peel off the vinyl surface, which can at times be easy (a whole swath at once!) and at other times maddeningly difficult (only fingernail-sized pieces coming off at a time).  This leaves a yellow paper backing that is stuck to the sheetrock with paste. To remove this, we spray the walls with an enzyme compound that breaks down the paste, and then the backing can be peeled off easily."

Here's a view of the same wall from a different angle.  All of the wallpaper has been removed and Jamie has started repair work.  On almost all of the walls we worked on, Jamie had to do a lot of repair work and then several coats of primer and usually two coats of paint.

The First Step – Foundation Work

Fortunately, neither of us had to move into the house immediately.  We bought the house in December 2011, and I still had my house in Houston, which didn't sell until April 2012.  Jamie still had his apartment down the street.  So we could attack some of the issues in the house without the complications of furnishings.  One of the first things we did in the house in December 2011 was to hire foundation people to stabilize the foundation.  Very few of the angles in this house are exactly right angles.  Windows have shifted so they are not square to the vertical, doors are slightly askew and some have had strips attached to their top to make them fit their frames, the floors have a lot of unevenness and the back bedroom floor has a slant with over an inch drop (Jamie believes it was originally an outdoor porch intentionally designed to slope downward for drainage).  The foundation people replaced some posts and did other things to strengthen the foundation, but said we won't be able to straighten the floors without causing serious problems everywhere else.  These issues became less noticeable after we furnished the house in the coming months, and we’re used to it anyway.

In the Beginning

Here it is --- the house as it was when we first saw it.   This photo disguises a failing paint job on the outside, and a multitude of sins on the inside.  For example:

Also from the listing photo.  Some people may like florid Victorian wallpaper, but we are not among them. This wallpaper (or a similar, slightly more palatable one) covered the hallway, all three bedrooms, the living room, and the dining room. Since the ceilings in these rooms are 13 feet high, this wallpaper extended up the wall for at least 10 feet.  We have met people who had considered buying this house but were deterred by the wallpaper.  These people sensibly wanted to be able to live in a house from the get-go without months of hard labor (or thousands of dollars paid to others).  We naively thought that it would not be a huge deal to get all the wallpaper down and paint the walls.