After living here for nine months, we've finally started doing some painting around the house. Every room with painted walls was a shade of white or beige, and we were starved for color, so dining room, nursery-in-progress, and bathroom (as seen a couple posts ago) all got face-lifts over the past month.
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| One gallon and three coats of paint later, the dining room has one bright red wall. |
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| I had intended a darker, grayer shade of blue for the nursery, but this will do. |
Encouraged by all the improvements, we decided to remove the wallpaper in our kitchen. Our kitchen is cramped, with a low ceiling, bad lighting, and cheap cabinets and counters, so it needs all the help it can get. And the checkered blue and white wallpaper that was peeling up at all the seams was one bad feature of the room that we felt confident that we could tackle without much trouble or expense.
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| Our claustrophobia-inducing kitchen. |
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| If you're going to put up wallpaper, might as well do it badly. |
According to people on the Internet who know about such things, you're always advised to remove a layer of wallpaper before putting up new stuff. But apparently the people who lived here before us didn't bother with trifling things like that, because we've found evidence of at least four other types of wallpaper underneath the top layer. Scraping it all off was a serious job until we discovered how to get hold of the bottom layer and peel everything up at once. Our favorite of the wallpapers is definitely the bottom one, shown below, which has various scenes of wagons, boats, and houses on it. The kitchen must have looked magnificent when it was completely covered in tiny brown drawings.
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| Two of the other four types of wallpaper we found under the top layer. |
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| Halfway through the wallpaper stripping, it just looked like the kitchen had caught fire. What's with the wood patch in the wall above the stove? We don't want to know. |
And yet another unfortunate surprise was that we don't even have normal drywall or plaster walls in our kitchen. Underneath all that wallpaper is hardboard, which is the composite wood stuff that pegboard is made from. In same places it's been cut and wrapped around the edges of the cabinets, and in other places it goes behind them. And the seams between the pieces of hardboard are some kind of plastic strips that are impossible to remove or to strip the wallpaper from. Sigh.
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| The exposed hardboard and plastic seams underneath all that wallpaper. |
We talk a big game about one day redoing the whole kitchen, enlarging it and getting all new cabinets and counters. When that day comes, I can't wait to get rid of the hardboard and put up some nice, normal drywall. But for now, all we can do is sand out all the weird irregularities, clean up the plastic strips as best we can, and give the room a few coats of paint. It's still going to look a whole lot better at the end than when we started, but we definitely bit off more than we were expecting.
