Gretchen took to referring to this bedroom as the 'creepy room.' For good reason.

One thing you can’t see in that photograph is the wall that runs along the side of the room where the doorway is. There was a very old light fixture with no pull chain or any way to turn it on or off. So once a lightbulb was put into it, it was on. Forever. Until you unscrewed it. Another thing you might not notice is the lack of outlets on the inside of the room. The only outlet in this room was on the side of said light fixture. That’s no good.

Before starting this project, we had an electrician give us a few quotes on installing some new outlets around the upstairs (of which we only had 3. In the entire 3 bedrooms upstairs.), and updating the ones we have downstairs to grounded 3-prong style outlets. We ultimately settled on Lehigh Valley Electric. Bob was our electrician, and I highly recommend him. He was honest about what we needed and didn’t need and even gave us some recommendations on how to fix other various things around the house. He also put down drop cloths everywhere and cleaned up everything when he was done.

Back to the room. The first thing we had to do was get rid of all of the old furniture. We’ve kept some of the stuff, if anyone needs a twin sized bed frame or an old dresser. Once we cleared it all out, we started removing the wallpaper. This time, we’re using a Wagner Steamer.

I bought the steamer on ebay for a few dollars more than it would have cost to rent one at Home Depot (just around $50 for 24-hours, ridiculous). After using it for this room, I’d consider it well worth that few dollars. I don’t know why we always try to do things the “hard” way first, but our aversion to wallpaper removal technology really set us back a lot. We started downstairs with spray bottles of vinegar water and putty knives, then upgraded to vinegar water and razor blade scrapers, and finally arrived at a steamer and razor blade scrapers. I think we’ve hit our productivity plateau. I really do recommend a steamer for this job.

I also had to remove the old baseboard heater cover. Following the advice of This Old House, I bought a long reciprocating saw blade and cut the nails that held the cover on. Once the cover slid off, we were left with a nice surprise. About five inches up from the floor on the far wall of the room, the wall just sort of ended. There was a gap between the floor and the wall in which you could see insulation and the outside wall. I have no idea why it was like that, but I knew I had to fix it.

The previous repair job for this issue resulted in a thin sheet of some sort of soft particle board being nailed into the beam that runs across the gap in an uneven fashion. That resulted in a few “steps,” caused by the different layers of patching and it looked horrible. I tore it all off and replaced it with some leftover drywall I had from our bathroom project. Then taped the seams and used a healthy layer of joint compound to smooth it all out. You can see where this happened in the picture below. The greenboard runs all of the way across the room.

With the wallpaper and heater out of the way, we began the arduous process of sanding any leftover glue off, then sanding the rough spots on the walls, then patching any holes or scrapes, then sanding, then patching, repeat. At some point after the walls were nice and smooth and wallpaper-free, my dad came over to help us remove the awful light fixture and run the electric up into the attic so that we could install recessed lighting. Because our ceilings are a little low upstairs, recessed lighting really turned out to be a great solution. Here’s a photo of the room after installing the lighting.

The lighting really was fairly simple to install. We measured the room and marked three equidistant spots on the ceiling where the lights would go. We picked up one of these 6″ hole saws to cut the holes in the ceiling. This model we used was a little more heavy duty because our ceilings are a thick plaster. This one would not have lasted long.

Once the holes were drilled, we installed the light housing.

This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be. The electrical wire connected to the first light in the line, and then from that light connected to the next. We just had to be sure to get the “Insulation Contact” model of housing, because our attic is insulated right up to the light fixtures. We also put in a Lutron dimmer switch, which is really nice because the three lights can give off a lot of heat.

Once the lights were in, we began painting. Because we intend to put new hardwood flooring down upstairs (what’s up there now is just a very squeaky subfloor), we were able to paint pretty quickly. It’s nice not having to worry about making a mess. Using our trusty Olympic Premium paint (zero VOCs!) we painted the ceiling white, then painted the walls, then painted the trim. Check out photos of the current state of the room below. Please ignore the mess, there’s still plenty left to do!

The new heater cover. Just need to do all the flooring first!

This is what's left of that weird gap between the floor and the wall post-drywalling and patching.

The new lights!

So what’s left to do?

1. Touch up paint from where the tape took some off
2. Install new hardwood floors
3. Heater cover
4. Base moulding

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Real pictures soon!

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Allow me to introduce the Piranha Wallpaper Shaver:

After stopping by Lowe’s to pick up some other things (A hose reel and a some joint compound), I checked out the wallpaper section to see what they had in stock. Oddly enough, they have done away with DIF (the stuff I spoke about in an older post) which is a fairly widely recognized brand, and started carrying Piranha brand products. I noticed this Wallpaper Shaver and decided that — after a few months of doing things as cheaply and non-gadget-or-miracle-solution-reliant as possible (putty knives and vinegar water) — I would give it a shot. It was only $8, so why not. Let me tell you, this thing rules.

Using the putty knives was and uphill battle. We had to SOAK the walls with vinegar water and even then it would take the paper off, but leave a film of glue on the wall that took a substantial amount of sanding to remove. I’ve been going over the living room again (where the wallpaper is fully removed but the glue remains) and spraying it with more vinegar water and using this thing and, as the name would suggest, it shaves the glue right off. It’s basically an ice scraper with a razor blade attached. I liked it so much, I went back to Lowe’s and purchased a second one for Gretchen.

Suggestion: I would be very careful when using something like this on sheetrock walls. It has a tendency to dig into the wall if you’re not careful. With our plaster walls we have some surface to spare, but it might do some more damage to drywall. Just be careful.

Another thing I noticed is that this brand is essentially an exact copy of this other product:

Hyde 4″ Wallpaper Shaver (The Wall Wolf)

Which can be purchased here. The difference between the two is that although the Piranha brand shaver claims to have replaceable blades, the blades it recommends are not available anywhere. I’m not even sure if they’re being manufactured. But in my search I came across replacements for the above tool and purchased them, hoping that because they are made to fit something that looks exactly like the Piranha shaver, that they would fit the Piranha shaver itself. We’ll see when they’re delivered, but because I’m not sure about it, I’d recommend getting the Wall Wolf (or whatever) and some replacement blades for that (because you know they’ll fit).

At any rate, the moral of this post is that if you feel your motivation for something waning, try to find a new, more interesting way to do it. Or go look at some tools. Of course, if you didn’t have the motivation to do the work in the first place, a new tool isn’t going to magically make that happen. But if you’re bored or frustrated with something, it’s possible that there’s a better way to do it. I’m surprised at how much of a difference it’s made. After a few plumbing disasters, a minor surgery that had me unable to work on the house, and spring making us want to work out in the yard (a whole other project), buying an eight dollar tool has me back in the living room, working steadily (even on weeknights). We’ve set a deadline of next weekend (also coinciding with a visit from a friend) to have the downstairs primed and ready to paint. It’ll be no easy task, but it’s looking good right now.

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We uncovered the other side of the archway that leads to the kitchen, and it’s patched just about as well as the kitchen side of it (with the backside of a piece of wood paneling). On this side an attempt was made to smooth out the joints with a little bit of joint compound and wall patch strips when it was closed up, so this should help when I cover the whole thing with a layer joint compound to smooth it out.

Sorry we don’t have any pictures, but it’s pretty uninteresting.

Another update for which I do not have pictures was a full replacement of our toilet’s guts. For a while now, we’ve been having strange noises occurring in our floor and basement shortly after flushing the toilet. We first noticed this out in the garage, when the water pipes were vibrating for some unknown reason. The noise started out as a low pitched hum and built up to almost a grinding noise by the time I got to fix it. After a little bit of internet research, I discovered that it’s a relatively minor problem with the toilet.

Apparently when the valve starts to go bad, the seal that stops the valve from letting water out when the tank is filling fails just enough to create a strange vibration in the pipe that runs water into the tank, and this vibration can carry through an entire plumbing system. In my searching I even read the story of a landlord of a multi-unit apartment building that had crazy noises throughout the entire building because of one faulty toilet. The noise in our bathroom could also be triggered by running water in the bathroom sink, which would take some pressure away from the valve and cause it to leak a little bit. I guess that’s also a common problem.

I verified the problem was with the toilet by lifting the lid off of the tank and pressing down on the top of the valve while the noise was happening. It stopped when I applied pressure, so I figured that was it. The toilet’s hardware looked like it had seen better days, so I opted just to replace everything in there with a valve and flapper from Lowe’s.

It was relatively inexpensive (I think around $11), so I bought the kit to replace everything, and after dealing with a noisy toilet for so long, I chose the Quiet Fill (supposedly tested to be the quietest toilet valve available). Installation was simple. For some reason the shut off valve on the pipe that runs into the tank was NOT shutting the water off to the toilet, so I had to turn the water off in the whole house.

I then flushed the toilet and kept the flapper open so the water in the tank drained into the toilet. I had to sponge out what was left (not all of it fully drained) so that I could open the inlet from the water pipe.

After this, I unscrewed the old valve at the bottom of the tank and removed it, unhooked the chain from the lever and removed the flapper. Putting the new one in was easy, I just repeated the steps in reverse and adjusted the height of the valve to the fill line on the tank, and turned the water back on.

After a few costly emergency visits from our plumber, burst water pipes, and snaking septic lines, I can say I’m finally getting comfortable enough with the plumbing system to feel like I can do small things myself. My next trick might be to replace the kitchen faucet with one that is a little bit taller. Washing bigger pots in that sink is impossible. We’ve also been doing a lot of research and reading looking for inspiration, and it’s finally struck, so look for more updates in the future as we pick out colors and begin painting the downstairs. And now that spring is finally here, my grandfather plans on helping us make a lot of things in his wood shop, including new kitchen cabinets.

What We Like

Gretchen is currently obsessed with this kitchen:

And looking on ebay for antique door knobs:

I’m currently obsessed with anything made out of bent wood:

We also plan on making a trip out to the Morris, NJ Habitat for Humanity store to see if they have any nice restored furniture or stuff for around the house.

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Sorry for the blurry pictures, turning the flash off makes that happen.

I peeled some of the wallpaper off of the soffit on the cabinet above the refrigerator and just painted white paint over the glue that was up there and it turned out pretty nice, so I’m thinking about just doing it over the rest of the cabinets to get rid of the dirty peeling wallpaper that’s up there until we redo the cabinets completely.

The walls being such a bright shade of white makes the trim look a little yellow, but it’ll have to stay that way until we get the living rooms done and then come back to the kitchen for the cabinets and such. The baseboard heaters are also the same color I think, I wonder if you can paint them… anyone know?

We also got the phone hung up all proper instead of having it hanging out of the wall and having a phone line running across the floor. It’s nice (even though our phone is probably the last remaining non-wireless phone in existence).

The Saturday after New Years, we got a lot done. My dad came over in the morning and helped drain the pipes in the garage and winterize the plumbing so that we could shut the electricity and heat off for the winter. That should save us some grief, and money. Thanks, Dad! Gretchen’s sister was also over and helped us scrape some wallpaper in the smaller living room, while I sanded the glue off of the wall in the bigger room and started spackling. Thanks, Merry! It’s coming along. I wanted to make more progress Sunday, but my arm was sore from sanding an entire room and we wanted to go visit Gretchen’s newborn nephew, so we did that instead and then watched Arrested Development on Boxee.

I know this makes our house look like a complete mess, but we have to keep everything packed and or covered up while we work so dust doesn’t get all over it. 3/4 walls in this room are scraped now… just the one wall is left (the one against the kitchen). I’m a little nervous to see what’s going on on the opposite side of the doorway that I had to patch up in the kitchen. They also uncovered this funny hole in the wall that appears to be filled in with cement. There must have been some kind of stove or something and had an exhaust pipe going out of the wall. It’s behind the hot water pipes that we are thinking of covering with a wooden box or some built in shelving, so we may not even need to patch it up, but it’ll be an adventure nonetheless.

This is just a shot of the wall in the bigger living room that I have sanded and started spackling. It looks SO much better than it did rough, and with the holes from the curtain hangers filled in. I’m so sick of sanding and then cleaning over and over, but the closer we get to being done, the more I want it to be done.

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To be fair, this is probably the worst bad spot, but overall there were quite a few small cracks in it. Googling today for “cracked joint compound“ returned an overabundance of warnings not to put joint compound on too thick, none of which were included in the pages I read yesterday before applying the joint compound. We also probably should have kept the heat on a constant temperature overnight/when we left for work this morning.

“your environment is making the out side of the compound cure befor the inside, thus developing the cracks. Make sure to turn on the heat or get a room heater to increase the temps in the room as walls and floring absorb alot of coolness over night.” -Some guy named Stugotz on Yahoo Answers.

We got home from work pretty late, but I was determined to clean up the cracks so that we could put another layer of compound up. Unfortunately I didn’t make it all the way through, but I smoothed out the worst areas. I did this by wet sanding the compound using water and a sponge. This takes a lot longer than traditional sanding, but once you factor in cleaning the dust off of everything you own, it evens out a bit. Here are some steps from About.com that you can follow for wet sanding:

1. Start with joint compound that is not completely dry. However the compound should be dry enough that it won’t immediately smear off when you touch it. Drywall joint compound a few hours old should be right.
2. Soak sponge in bucket, then squeeze out.
3. Start with light, circular motions. Remember, let the water do the work more than pressure from your hand. Right now, you’re just concentrating on the high ridges and the spiky portions.
4. When it gets too difficult or the smears are too thick, rinse out and squeeze sponge in bucket. Sponge should be wetter than on the first pass.
5. On this second pass, since you’ve already taken down the high ridges, you can concentrate on lowering the joint compound “bump.”
6. After two passes, you’re done. Any more wet sponging will get the drywall paper too wet. If two passes aren’t sufficient, you may need to dry sand the joint compound.

Thanks Lee Wallender!

Wet sanding helped smooth out rough edges and the wet joint compound filled in most of the cracks. Here’s where it ended up (I’m letting it dry more):

The picture doesn’t show that the cracks are filled with a light layer of wet compound. You can still see them, but the surface is smooth. A second coat once this one is dry should hopefully smooth it over more.

Gretchen took a bit of wallpaper off from over the archway on the opposite side of the kitchen. That wall is basically done now, and it looks pretty nice.

Our next challenge is going to be figuring out how to take off this 61 year old wallpaper that was covered up on the underside of the archway.

Unlike the rest of the original wallpaper, this was not removed before the newer layer of wallpaper was put up. It’s on there pretty good. Hopefully we’ll make more progress tomorrow.

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(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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The paper itself peeled off very easily. Most corners were a little dog-eared, and by pulling on them slowly at an angle it came off in one piece. “We’re halfway done,” we thought. Then we noticed the layer of paper-like glue that still covered the walls.

This is not a picture of the kitchen, but the walls in the stairwell have a similar coating after peeling the wallpaper off there. Here’s what it looked like:

A little research on the internet led us to a product called DIF, made by Zinsser:

Most sites (including Zinsser’s own) that I read said it was a non-toxic substance and that the enzymes do all the work. Unfortunately, after buying it and bringing it home, Gretchen read the instructions and found this little gem on the bottom of the back label:

“This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

So we promptly returned our massive bottle of DIF and purchased a massive bottle of vinegar from the grocery store:

By cutting water in a spray-bottle with 1 cup of vinegar we found that the glue scraped right off with a putty knife. We’ve also read that diluted fabric softener works the same way (or better). More about that after we try it out. This part was pretty messy, but went pretty quickly with the two of us working.

Our first unexpected discovery is that there used to be a doorway between the kitchen and the front living room. We didn’t know about this, so after removing the wallpaper we were surprised to find the archway patched halfway with drywall and halfway with what appears to be the back side of a piece of wood paneling. This is what it looked like (post spackling [to smooth out the edges]):

I asked around about this, and short of tearing out the doorway and patching it back in to make it more flush, the best way I’ve heard to cover up this rough spot is with some joint compound. For now I’m just going to spackle the rough spots on the wall to get it cleaned up a bit. There was a lot of damage to the surface of the wall. It appears that the first round of wallpaper was removed before the current wallpaper was hung, and that took a layer of plaster off with it in irregular patterns all over the wall.

After scraping the glue off of the wall, we wiped it down with water and TSP:

This is a heavy duty cleaner that you should probably not get on your hands. It cleaned some things that probably haven’t been clean in 30 years. We used some rubber gloves, because this stuff will burn your skin. It helped clean off the last of the stickiness and prepped the wall before spackling. We chose TSP substitute because it’s phosphate free and better for the environment (and probably for us).

I used some basic lightweight spackle to smoothe over the rough spots and fill in the holes:

I also cleaned up the rough surface around the patched doorway, and tried to make the transition between the wall and the patching as smooth as possible, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be that noticeable afterwards. It didn’t really clean it up enough, but it definitely does look better.

I let the spackle dry for a day, and sanded it down the next day. The sanding left our house a nice coat of dust all over EVERYTHING, and was pretty hard to clean up. I’d advise anyone that has a lot of spackle repair to do in one place to either do it before they move in, or to move everything out of the room and close it off to keep the dust from getting everywhere. Fortunately (or unfortunately in most cases) a majority of our belongings are still in moving boxes (and we hope to get the walls done before getting comfortable), so it didn’t mess up a whole lot.

After cleaning up all of the dust, I wiped the walls down with TSP and water one more time and began taping the trim.

We picked up a can of Killz 2 Latex Primer (we went with the latex this time after realizing the oil based primer takes forever to dry), and got our painting supplies ready.

I did the trim with a brush, and then rolled the rest of the wall with a roller. After drying, it looks pretty good (for having just one coat of primer and no paint):

While I was priming the walls in the kitchen, Gretchen picked up where she left off on scraping the wallpaper in the living room. Here’s what we’re faced with in the rest of the downstairs rooms. Two full rooms of this:

The wallpaper has a weird texture on the surface, and does not come off in sheets like the kitchen. So we’re forced to scrape it off little by little. The same vinegar and water mixture and a putty knife works okay on that, but we plan to try using fabric softener and TSP to see if it works any better. The good news about this, is that the glue comes off with the paper, so it’s a lot less messy, but a lot more time consuming.

This is where Gretchen picked up the scraping:

And this is where she stopped (the wall is pretty much done!):

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