Day 578: All in all it's just another scrape of the wall

We don't need no stained wallpaper

We don't need no smell of old

No ugly flowery textured patterns

Carolyn, scrape that paper off.

Hey! Carolyn! Scrape that paper off!

All in all it's just another scrape of the wall

All in all we're just endlessly scraping the wall

Time to venture out into a new room. Care particularly hated the front reception (smoking) room. The walls were stained and ugly so we decided to take it back to bare plaster and re-skim once again. The goal was to maintain the original coving if at all possible but we wouldn't know the state of the ceiling until scraping off the 2 layers of wallpaper covering it up .. yes, there was 2 layers of wallpaper on the ceiling that the previous owners decided to paint over multiple time to make this job that much more fun.

Care full of ambition and positivism tackling the first bit of wall. A couple of days light work I think ...

Scrape, scrape, scrape ...

Caitlin getting in on the work .. You can see the next layer of lovely wallpaper underneath. I'm not wallpaper historian but I'm guessing 60's?

 

A wallpaper scorer (or child motivator?) ....

It allows the chemicals to seep behind the wallpaper to come off much more easier. We elected to use wallpaper stripper vs the steam machine of limit the chances of the original plaster blowing away from the brickwork.

No family member was spared from the fun of scraping away at the wallpaper. Including yours truly although I somehow avoided the camera on this job ...

And yes, this was a very, very messy job. 

So pretty much there now. All the baseboards have been removed and the walls mostly cleared of wallpaper. Luckily they are in pretty decent shape with no spots pulling away from the walls. The ceiling has a few beauty cracks but also hopefully salvageable. We'll speak to the plasterer and hopefully that's the case.

So this job was about 90% Carolyn, 5% Scott and 5% Ash/Caitlin. And this has taken us well over a month of weekends and evenings. Not a particularly fun job.

Hey! Carolyn! Scrape that paper off!