The Destruction Begins

Always got to make a funny face. Oh well, yesterday we randomly got the destruction itch. It started on Saturday I believe when I decided to start pulling down the UGLY brick wall paper. Got a good chunk of it off but its not coming off very easily so its taking some time.

Yesterday, Mike and I were replacing a few more ugly light switches and recepticals. What happened was in the dining room Mike peeled back some of the paper so that we wouldn't have to remove the switch plate cover again when we were pulling the paper off and that's when it all started. The corner was loose and the child in me couldn't help but keep pulling, and pulling and all of a sudden, no more wall paper in the dining room.

It was funny too because while I was reveling in pulling off the wall paper in the kitchen, I over hear Mike removing the ugly plastic (nope not real copper) panels in the kitchen. I caught him in the act and complained because I don't know if I got enough pictures of the kitchen before he had a go at it. But I am glad they are down - although now the kitchen is very yellow. But I think its so much more tolerable now.

The dining room has lots of interesting things to note... like why are there FOUR LAYERS OF WALL PAPER ON THE WALLS!? FOUR! I counted. There's the ugly Blue on top, the ugly pink with flowers below, then there's the shiny gold with flowers below that, then below that it appears to be white with palms and flowers and finally below that is a pastel green paint. Lovely. The top to layers came off easily, but I am not looking forward to removing the bottom to layers - they are really old and brittle and seem to have been made of real... paper believe it or not. Who wants to deal with easy to remove viynl wall paper anyways? (I do!) The pink paper below the blue crap that was patchwork quilted on appears to look like they tried to paint it and it didnt work too well, so they just wall papered over it. I also noticed in some places it was taped (the wide brown almost transparent plastic crap) to the wall because some seams were no longer holding. It at least seemed like it was put up with more care than the top layer. I still can't believe there's four layers.

Then of course there's the radiator... how do you remove wall paper from behind the radiator? Apparently, this was an interesting problem for the first owner too because there's no pastel blue-green paint on the wall behind the radiator - just wall paper on the sheet rock - so that's going to be fun to remove. I honestly think we are going to have to drain the radiators and take it out just so that we can remove the paper and paint back there. Mercy - why did I want an old house with "charm". So, we may paint the rest of the room once all the paper is removed and have to leave what's behind the radiator utnil next summer. HA!