Sticky situation

Now that the house is all ours, time to make the changes that will make it feel like our home, as opposed to just some house.  For Joe, that means the bumper rails so the dogs can safely come into the house.  For me, that means wallpaper removal.

I did a lot of Googling to get ready for this.  I ordered up a wall paper steamer, we picked up putty knifes and a drop cloth.  I thought for sure that I was ready.  When I started pulling and the vinyl paper peeled off of the wall in giant strips, I thought I was in for a quick, easy update for the offices.

Ha.

First there was this little blooper when I got too excited about pulling off the paper.

Oops

I thought getting the wallpaper off the wall would make me feel accomplished, but it only showed me how much work I had to do.  Lots of screw holes to fill and lots of glue to remove.

It also showed me this.

Why hello there, 70's

By all the saints of interior design, what is that?!  A little investigation showed that under the textured vinyl wallpaper was more wallpaper.  That had been painted over.  Foil wallpaper.  My simple project suddenly got a lot more complicated.

The previous occupants got the foil wallpaper off of about half of the fourth level, so that half was easy.  Use the steamer, scrape off the glue with a putty knife, no problem!  Super messy, but not difficult.  But as soon as I hit the painted over foil wallpaper, I was slowed to a crawl.

Tomorrow I will be picking up a scoring tool so that my steamer has a chance of making it through this mess.  I can't paint over this, especially the sections where the paint bubbled.  No choice but to take it all off, one way or another.

My new neighbors brought us a gift basket and it included a six pack of beer.  I think I'm going to put that to good use scraping my way through the little 70's flashback I found on the fourth floor.