If These Walls Could Speak (bedroom, part I)

July 5, 2008: stripping off wallpaper

I have no idea what time it is--the power winked off sometime this morning and I'm awakened by the sound of the answering machine beeping off. As soon as the cats see I'm awake it's determined to be 'breakfast time' and Toby is out there making as much noise as possible (my passive aggressive Kitty). I go back to sleep for a little while and am finally roused by Annie purring as loudly as she can (just barely audible) starring at me with wide green eyes and gently patting me on my arm with a couple of claws--this is the "I'm seriously hungry and waiting for you!!" pat, so I assume it's about 9am.

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After feeding the cats (blessed quietude during their post-meal nap!) I decide to start stripping off some wallpaper. Since most of the furniture is piled over on the left side of the room, I figured the right wall is as good a place as any to start. I expect to run into the most trouble there, though, as one corner is adjacent to a known water-damaged area and I've already uncovered some crack repair remnants near that corner.

The first step is to remove the corner guards--pieces of decorative wood used to protect and/or hide outside wall corner seams. I have 8 of these in the bedroom around the semi-circle part--1 each side of the opening and 2 at each dormer. I don't know how long these have been here (the house has undergone 2 major eras of construction or remodeling: pre-1900 and sometime again in the 1920s/1930s), but my guess is that the corner covers were installed at first construction. I want to be able to reinstall the guards in the exact same spot later, so I mark them A through H around the room from left to right; the two I have to remove to work on the right wall are G and H. They were nailed in place with regular 3-penny finish nails, some of them catching the wall corner straight on so there is some pretty nasty cracking and small chunks of wall are flaking away as I'm carefully prying them loose. Damage is minimal for corners, but I can see that most of the wall is sound around them and what cracking I discover can be easily repaired with the rest of the wall later. The guards appear to be milled out of one piece of wood, not two seamed pieces as I thought they would be. This is good--it will make it easier to strip off the layers of paint and clean up the edges. Piece H, the one from the water-damaged corner, came away easily enough given the condition of the walls there, but paint and wallpaper on the adjacent damaged side (slated to be stripped after the round section is repaired and primed) started pulling away with the wood. Walls under the covers are bare plaster, confirming that these have been installed since initial construction.

Any loose wallpaper has been scraped off, the floors and baseboards are covered, and I'm ready to apply a dilution of wallpaper stripper. I didn't really want to start with this section of wall--I know there's got to be some extensive cracking and I'll need to be extra careful working here--I'll move slowly.

In the meantime, I should probably get out of my pyjamas.

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Here's the plan: 5oz of DIF wallpaper stripper per 1 gal distilled water, sprayed on with a hand-pump sprayer, then scrape off the wallpaper with a wide scraper. This method should "produce quick results." Here's hoping . . .

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One hour later, and I've already learned a few things:

Wallpaper stripper only really works on 1 layer at a time (I didn't know that, but it makes sense!)

Wallpaper stripper seems to work best while it's still wet a few seconds after application--this means working in small sections instead of a large range. I'll think of this as training for working with lime wash later--small sections, speed.

Wallpaper stripping is more like pulling skin from a healing sunburn and not the complete undressing in one fell swoop I had hoped for. Darn.

Working with curved walls is weird--every movement must be horizontal to keep from gouging the layers underneath or the plaster.

My chiropractor is going to kill me.

Oh well. The up-side is that I should be able to get a fairly large area of colorful victorian print paper exposed! I took a few photos already for the blog--the 2nd layer down doesn't come out well at all, just looks like mottled brown gunge. It looks nearly the same up close, though, so maybe the photos don't lie--LOL! It's very clearly from the 1920s/1930s. My guess is that it once may have been a pale gold color. It has a tiny print of overlapping gold (shiny!) stems about 1/2" long in a random pattern. At first glance it looks like that's all there is to the pattern--gold squiggles on a pale background--but closer inspection shows some sort of microdot overlay . . . and then maybe a hint of tiny pale gold or other light color leaves. I'm not sure. I've got my face 2" away from it, and I'm not sure. It didn't hold up well, and it scrapes away easily.

This is going to take a bit longer than I thought, scraping away time and history. Somebody's story. My goal is to have this whole section down to plaster, repaired and primed before August, when the landlords will be up to remove the AC/heat unit in the window--the painters are coming again to finish the exterior work started last fall. This type of work with plaster walls always looks worse and worse the further you get into it . . .until one day it's just done and fantastic looking. Do I keep working this one section of wall, or move to the dormers and get those finished so the landlords will have something to see that says: here, this is what it will all look like! I'm torn. The walls need attention, and I'm applying wet solutions in the dead of summer and every weekend I'm faced with heat, humidity and thunderstorms--the worst possible weather for this type of work.

It's decided then--work the walls and hope I'm not in the middle of repairing the plaster when they come for the AC units . . . LOL!