April rolled in and the weekend of April 2-4 brought together our first weekend with a team of workers!
I was off work on Friday, April 2, so Brody and I headed to JC early to get started on the work for the weekend. The goal of the weekend was to take down the wallpaper throughout the house.
If you're keeping up with lessons, today I present Lesson #2: A wallpaper steamer is worth every penny.
We picked up a wallpaper steamer on Friday morning. We really only needed to get through the layers of paint to the wallpaper and the steamer took the paper right off the walls. Steam, scrape, done. Actually, it was more like scrape, steam, scrape, done.
We did find some interesting wallpapers along the way. Most of it was so old, it was difficult to tell what the patterns were. Some of the wallpaper had been on the walls so long, the patterns were bleeding into one another. The good news: the steamer took the many layers of wallpaper and whatever was left of the glue holding it in place right off the plaster.
The Friday work team included Brody, Gaven, Karen and Robin and me, of course. :) We started in the backroom, which really became our starting point for all projects. It is a smaller room with lower ceilings so it felt like the right space to start projects and try things out. We quickly learned that we needed an initial scrape off the layers of paint and the steamer was much more effective. The steamer over the paint really just made it a sticky mess and gunk-ed up our scrapers. Brody, Gaven, Karen and Robin were assigned the job of scraping paint and I came behind them with the steamer to remove the wallpaper. It was a dirty job. Scraping stirred up all kinds of 100 year old dust (and probably asbestos). Steaming was a very hot job. It wasn't easy work, but we managed to get quite a bit done on Friday.
Gaven removing the closet hardware in the backroom closet.
Robin scraping in the front room. You can see there were vertical stripes in the wallpaper at some point. There was also a large border at the top of the room. I imagine it was very grand with rich colors. I also imagine it made the rooms feel smaller but much taller than they already are with the vertical lines.
More of the living room wallpaper removal.
A tiny bit of history here - I mentioned in an earlier post that Mamaw and Papaw rented the house from the Hancock Family from 1959 to 1973. Mom and Robin said Ms. Hancock would not allow them to paint or do anything to the walls for a long time while they were renting.
I've borrowed a picture from my Mom's facebook page that shows the wallpaper. It is difficult to see, but it appears to be pink flowers with some darker burgundy running vertically. This was my mom and her younger brother, Denny, celebrating their birthday. (You've already seen the room named "Denny's bedroom, so you've kind-of already met him.). They were born on the same day, 7 years apart. This picture was taken in 1965 - Mom was 15 and Denny was 8.
Mom also shared this picture, where you can see the flower pattern of the wallpaper a bit better. This features Denny in his cowboy outfit. This picture doesn't have a date, but Mom thinks Denny was about 5 or 6, so it would have been the early 1960's.
Back to 2021...
I'd also like to highlight some important advice from Brody and I - when you do hard physical things all day, you should reward yourself when your work is finished for the day. 😊
On Saturday, Scott and my Dad joined the work team. We did much of the same work - scraping, steaming and scraping some more.
Brayden stopped by for a little while to help. Most of his help on this day was in the line of "moral support". 😉
Brody and Gaven working in the dining room.
My cousin, Chris, also stopped by for moral support. He was on his way to play golf. He checks in every couple of weeks to see how things are coming along.
Sunday was more of the same: scraping, steaming, scraping. The work team was diminished to only Scott and I. We finished removing all the wallpaper from the house, with the exception of the bathroom and kitchen.
Denny's Bedroom
Mamaw's Bedroom
The Front Room
The Backroom
The Dining Room
The wall below was in possibly the worst shape. It had various stages of repair. It also is the wall that has the place where the coal stove entered the chimney. If you look closely at the photo, you can see the "paper plate" covering the hole. I really wanted the corner where the fuse box is cleaned up as well, so the decision was made to replace this wall with sheetrock. When that decision was made, the effort to remove the wallpaper was quickly abandoned.
Scott and I were the lone survivors for the work group photo on Sunday afternoon! 😊
We left feeling pretty good about the weekend - and very dirty from scraping and steaming wallpaper. Next up, skim coating!
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