Our New Old House

Pick-a-little talk-a-little CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP! 8/28/07 Tags: wallpaper, photos

Fans of The Music Man will recognize the subject of my blog post. Anybody who hasn’t seen The Music Man, just know that it references a song that is guaranteed to get stuck in your head if you hear it once, so consider yourself lucky for not getting it. (Now that I don’t work in Mason City, Iowa, the inspiration for River City in The Music Man, I’m FINALLY allowed to say I’M SICK OF THE MUSIC MAN!!!)

Now, on to the post!

That afternoon, Grandma came over from down the street and helped me scrape the paint off the wallpaper in the back bedroom and continue my progress in the dining room. Plus she brought me quesadillas for lunch! Can’t beat that!

She did get exasperated at my method of working on a little piece of each room at a time and said I move around the house too much. “You’ve got to do one room at a time!” she said. “But I’m bored of this wall. I want to work on a different wall,” I replied. She just shook her head and laughed at me.

Before long, I had moved on to the wallpaper in the kitchen. That was a lesson in home decorating mistakes of the past. First of all, when I came on the scene, the kitchen sported a coat of the nastiest “Harvest Gold” paint made only nastier by the dense layer of cigarette tar that darkened the color from “Harvest Gold” to “Baby Diahrrea.” I knew going into it that the paint was put on top of wallpaper, and that there were several layers of wallpaper over the plaster. What I didn’t realize was that the odd stripes here and there under the paint were actually masking tape. Whoever painted had put masking tape over each seam of the wallpaper, presumably because the wallpaper had begun to peel off. This was to my benefit, though, because it was easy to slip my razor blade under that and just start peeling away big chunks at a time. After that, the Downy made short work of the many layers underneath.

Here are some wallpaper pictures:

Kitchen:

Dining Room:
Grandma working on the dining room:

Hallway:

Front bedroom:

Grandma tried using mineral spirits to loosen the paint. That worked a little, but we’re going to try something a little stronger next time.

[tags]wallpaper, photos[/tags]

Tags: photos, wallpaper

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 9:02 pm and is filed under photos, wallpaper. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.