Sweet Success!

Victory is so sweet! We have officially banished the red painted over wallpaper, with all its peeling seams, to the trash. We didn't even really mean to, it all happened pretty quickly, but oh my word am I glad it did. I had all intentions of spending my day in the half bath working on the remaining paper in there. We've had the door closed and a mess of wallpaper in that bathroom for weeks now, but since we had company over the weekend we had to get it back into working order. Since we can't ignore it anymore I was intent on making some progress in there. As I was saying our goodbyes with my sister she remarked on a peeling little corner in the kitchen. This was a small tear I'd made a while ago to see if we could see what might be underneath. It appeared to be drywall so I pushed the piece back into place and have left it alone since. So my sister said, "oh I just want to pick that right off", so I went ahead and pulled it off. To my surprise a whole section came clear off the wall.

We said our goodbyes and I raced back to the kitchen to get started. Dave barely had time to finish checking his email before I had nearly the whole kitchen done. It came off in huge pieces, it was like pulling a fruit roll up off the plastic wrapper. Most of the walls were nice, clean drywall underneath. In a few places we found a layer of the flowered wallpaper from the laundry room. In others, mostly corners and tight spots, we found evidence of three different papers, and a border!

Layer #1 - brown, tan and blue 80's tiny flowery stripes
Layer #2 - garden botanical from the laundry room
Layer #3 - blue and white speckled, with an unknown border

Now I'm not sure at what point, and with which previous owner, all of these layers were put down and taken up but it seems that nobody could ever complete the job. There were a few places with only the botanical print, meaning someone took down about 90% of the under layer before putting up the speckled print, but gave up on other finishing the job. And then there were the places where all 3 layers were present. Anyway, it all came up easily. It only took us a few hours to get rid of all the paper, and backing, in the whole kitchen. It will need a little bit of spackling and sanding before we paint, but otherwise it is nearly ready to go.



This accomplishment absolutely made my day. I like to stick to cool colors, not hideous rusty brown reds, so I am so excited that it is gone! The kitchen already looks bigger and brighter.