For a rare change instead of getting home from work and plunking down in front of the TV and loosing myself for hours to the addictivness that is the boob tube I actually forced myself to do something slightly more productive.
It all started this past weekend. With a solid day of rain on Saturday and scattered showers on Sunday I was actually fairly motivated to do some work around the house. Normally a weekend of beautiful weather is just too tempting for me to stick around the house and do projects. I'd much rather be out doing something. Even if that something invloves staying inside and not enjoying the beauty of the day. But this weekend was cloudy, stormy, and rainy. The perfect kind of weather to stay in the house and not feel like I was missing out on something more fun.
This weekend's project was to scrape more paint and wallpaper off of the walls in the living room. I made a pretty substantial dent and pretty much finished up scraping two of the living room walls. Once the scraping is complete though there is still a long way to go before the wall is ready for paint. The scraping has been doing a great job of removing the paint and most of the backing of the multiple layers of wallpaper. But there is a bit of the wallpaper adhesive and stubborn pieces of wallpaper backing left behind. To remove this we move onto phase three of the removal process. Scrubbing with hot water.
There doesn't seem any really good way to shortcut this whole process. I've tried it several different ways with varying degrees of success. The best thing I've come up with so far is to start with a paint scraper / putty knife and get the many many layers of paint off of the wallpaper. Then follow behind with a serious tungsten bladed paint scraper to remove the multiple layers of wallpaper and backing from the walls. The final step is to use hot water and a scotch scrubber sponge to soften and remove the remaining stubborn pieces of paper and the wallpaper glue.
Tonight's project was to complete Step 3 of the process above for the walls that I had stripped clean this weekend. I didn't feel like words alone could convey the mind numbing tedium and work involved in the process so I put together a short video. Enjoy!