1/32nd of the Living Room Wallpaper is Done!
By Joe at 8 December, 2008, 10:46 am
Before getting into wallpaper, I wanted to mention that I put a first layer of joint compound over top of the patched door in the kitchen to make the doorway more flush with the wall. Right now it’s still drying. This was my first, ever, use of joint compound (“mud”) and I now wish I had used it to repair the bulk of the wall in the kitchen. It covers cracks and divots in plaster more cleanly than spackle, and is much easier to spread over long sections of wall. It will save a lot of sanding time. I picked up ready-to use DAP joint compound and a 10” putty knife at Lowe’s.
(Lowe’s tip #1: You can find generic equivalents of almost all of the products they stock on hooks or shelves at eye-level down on the floor in boxes to save some $$$. For example, a brand name putty knife hanging on a hook can cost $4-6, but if you get one of the box on the bottom shelf they cost about half that.)
(Lowe’s tip #2: Go to this page and register and they’ll send you a 10% off an entire purchase coupon in the mail. We’ve also been receiving a steady supply of these coupons after filling out two change of address forms [one for the each of us]).
The Joint compound filled the indented doorway pretty nicely, and is drying a solid white color. It looks pretty good. I’ll wet sand it tomorrow (thanks for the advice JCC), and add another layer and we should be ready to paint. I also patched up the spots I missed with the spackle initially. Putting on a coat of the primer helped us find those spots a lot better.
In the living room, Gretchen continued her rotation around the wall, scraping off the paper and glue, and got most of a wall done. She continued to use vinegar cut with hot water in a spray bottle, because we forgot to pick up fabric softener when we were out at Wegman’s today. We DID however stock up on all of the things we haven’t been able to find since leaving Philly. Not a lot of grocery stores around here carry seitan. Here’s the wall:
With that wall and this section done, we now have a corner of the living room wallpaper free:
While waiting for the joint compound to set, I joined in on the scraping, and uncovered this lovely bit of wall:
It looks like after the walls were up, a vertical strip about 6 inches wide was cut into the wall to run the electrical work through. Then the hole was covered with a sheet of what appears to be metal and then slathered in spackle (or joint compound, I really don’t know what the big difference is besides consistency) to smooth it out. This caused some headache in scraping the paper off. On the rest of the wall, if you made the paper wet enough, it would scrape off. Then another wetting would let you scrape the glue right off. With this patch of wall, I basically had to scrape off a layer of the spackle underneath the glue with a 1” putty knife to get anything that was on top of it off. It looks a little sloppy now, but we can sand it down and patch up any rough spots later. The whole house looks pretty messy right now anyway.
Hopefully, tomorrow will mark the end of kitchen work and we’ll be set to paint it. I think we’re just going with white for now because we plan on putting in new cabinets and appliances sometime next year, and we can just paint over the white with a suitable color then.
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dude, it looks so much better without that ugly ass wallpaper, even if it’s just bare drywall. your place looks awesome and i expect to attend a house party so we can make it all dirty after you clean it up.
Joe +Gretch Don,t use vinyl joint compound hard to sand,I like to use wide plastic or stainless steel spackle knives the most flexible ones
Thanks dad, what do you recommend? All we saw at Lowe’s was this kind.