Wall Work

Man...the walls in this place are really working us over! If the wall-o-wood wasn't enough, we found "buried" wallpaper on 3 different walls -- buried in the sense that the original wallpaper had been painted over numerous times. Our first discovery came when a corner of the wallpaper started to pull away in the dining room. We didn't just want to cut away the peel, repair it and add another coat of paint. Since the discovery of our wood floors, and their impending need to be refinished, we decided now was the time to fix the walls correctly.


Using putty knives and water soaked sponges, we were able to wet the wallpaper and scrape it off of the dining room wall. Interestingly enough, as you can see in the picture above, the wallpaper only covered a portion of the wall -- we're thinking it was a mural of some sort. Anyway, it revealed a ton of nail holes to be repaired, two cracks and the two large seams, all of which you can see above. We did our best to skim-coat it with drywall compound in trying to blend the cracks and seams into the existing painted walls. The results, after a coat of Kilz:


Time for an easy one -- the master bedroom. While removing the baseboard I discovered this lovely wallpaper.


Sweet, huh?!?! As you can see, this wallpaper had also been painted over. My first thought was "Oh no, not again." However, after further inspection, I discovered that the wallpaper glue had completly "dried-up" and, no lie, I was able to gently pull each individual section off the wall in a complete strip, paint and all. Below is a pic of the wall with about two strips left to go. You can even still see the pencil lines drawn by whoever was hanging the wallpaper!


Oh, and much like the dining room wall, the original owners had only put the wallpaper on one wall, so that was definitely a positive. After it was all removed I used a plastic putty knife to chip away all the loose glue particles, re-set the old drywall nails, patched the holes and two coats of Kilz to cover the greenish color left behind by the glue residue.

Finally, we turned our attention to a wall in the office. This wall had also originally been wallpapered, but then painted over. Do you see a theme here?!?! This job mirrored the dining room removal process -- water and scrapers to remove the paper (and paint) and then the messy job of patching holes, repairing minor cracks and two coats of Kilz.