Day 1955: Scraping with style ..

Carolyn and the kids were up to their favourite hobby this weekend .. scaping wallpaper. Since MTL is going to be plastering the new loft room, why not get them to continue on to the first floor. We just needed to get things ready for them.

And as usual, we found some real gems under the first layer of wallpaper. Any guesses which decade this came from?

We found a good use for the Covid masks here. 

And who says PPE doesn't have to be cool?!

Ash really got into this activity .. 

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!

Day 239: Masters of plaster

To put things into context, these walls have seen through 2 world wars and been metres away from German bombs (literally dropping on the doorstep). No surprise that they've seen better days. But no worries, things are looking up for our kitchen walls.

A little TLC and they will look great once again.

First the corners around the door frames, if you can still call them that since there was little corner left in them. I needed to strip them back to pretty much brick to get a straight edge. I used some rough corner beads to build back the corner shape - being careful to keep the edge straight and plumb. Given that the door jam was somewhat slanted, I don't think it would have been geometrically possible to get all sides even - or that's the story and I'm sticking to it. Anyway, it's close and I challenge anybody coming over to tell me otherwise.

I even managed to get Care getting her hands dirty. Stripping away wallpaper. This time we had a textured floral print both in the natural and pastel blue forms .. and some nice ducky wallpaper.

I also tackled the back wall where the 900 range is going. Turns out, that was where the original range was before somebody had the bright idea of relocating it. (shaking head). Anyway, the wall was completely uneven, part un plastered and part poorly plastered. No problem for the masters of plaster. A little bonding coat to get the surface even-ish. And some finish coat to get a nice smooth finish. Well nice enough to be hidden by tile later on :)

Day 154: Something a-peeling

Today the task was to tackle the wallpaper. It's about 3 layers deep from what I can tell and painted over at least once. What that means is that it's going to be a pain in the @$$ to take off. I am definitely curious what lies beneath - a healthy plaster wall or a crumbly mess?

Today's tools:

• gloves 
• 100mm scraper 
• wallpaper remover 
• a poky, pointy stick 
• some elbow grease 

Although it looks like some medieval torture device, the pointy stick is actually for perforating the wallpaper to allow the wallpaper remove to really soak in. It worked a treat and the task was easier thank planned (although I planned for the worst).

 

The wallpaper remover gets mixed with water (kinda like a dish soap consistency). After about 10 min, it eats away at the wallpaper adhesive and it can be scraped away with a scraper. Recommendation is to invest in a good one to save some effort in getting the paper off the wall. The on that I use has replaceable blades so that it's always sharp.

 

Still, the task took the better part of the afternoon and made quite a mess - see from the pictures. I even had to enlist the work of a couple of smaller helpers to get finished. Good news is that the wall underneath all that paper was in pretty good shape. Now that I've finished with the sockets, I'll get around to doing a skim coat of plaster and it will be ready for paint.