Progress is Made in the Kitchen and Living Room

Seeing the wallpaper in the kitchen peeling on the edges by itself, we thought that room would be as good a place as any to start. Unfortunately, we got overzealous one night and peeled all the paper off by hand without taking any “before” pictures, but to give you an example of what we were faced with, imagine an entire room that looked like this:

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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