2/21/2006

Out, damn wallpaper!!

It's official: the upstairs hall is now a wallpaper-free zone. Any wallpaper attempting to enter this area will be burned on sight. Seriously, I'm tempted to have a bonfire in the backyard and burn the 2 bags of paper that I have left...

I got curious the other day and figured out that I have stripped approximately 2500 square feet of wallpaper off of the walls in the living room and hall. That's a lot of freakin' wallpaper!

I'll post some pictures soon, but I wanted to have a post to celebrate the end of the wallpaper. The walls areally aren't much to look at right now, but they're goregous to me, since they are free from the confines of the wallpaper. Starting tomorrow or Thursday, I'll be priming the walls with an oil-based primer/sealer. This will keep the plaster from sucking all of the moisture out of the drywall compound when Phil skims the walls. Without the primer, the "mud" would dry too quickly and crack.

We are now working on a schedule. Phil will be coming over on Saturday morning to start taping the cracks and repairing the holes, so everything has to be done before then. I finished up witht he wallpaper today. Shayne removed all of the remaining woodwork a few days ago, which will make the priming and skimming much easier. All that's left is to screw some more plaster washers into the sagging parts of the ceiling.

We've also decided on a final design for the bathroom remodel/restoration. Instead of turning the office closet into a bathtub alcove, we've decided to split it between a linen closet and a walk-in shower. This will preserve the closet door in the hallway (and return it to what it probably was to begin with!), as well as emiminate any major changes in the floorplan. The wall that we were thinking about removing is probably a load-bearing wall, so it will be much easier just to put a doorway in it, instead of bracing it from the attic. It will also allow the bathroom to appear to be period-authentic, excepting the door to the shower. The shower will not be visually disruptive to the character of the bathroom, but it will be larger than the frameless enclosure we planned on putting in the corner. There will be lots of shuffling with the plumbing, but I like the designs much better. The website I used would only allow me to design in metric, but I think I have the scale properly done. The "box" next to the toilet will be some sort of built-in cabinet, but it might be relocated to where the sink is.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I appreciate your disdain for wallpaper! Five of the six rooms downstairs had wallpaper, and the sixth has just a border. I just took the last of it down over the weekend. Feels good, doesn't it?!! Now for the upstairs....Ugh!

Congrats!