ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
Wallpaper wars
November 18, 2008
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Denise Holtby
SPECIAL TO YOURHOME.CA
When it comes to Room for Improvement’s do-it-yourself decorating efforts this past week, the words of that wise philosopher Roseanne Roseannadanna ring true: "It’s always something."
It’s week five of our two-month bathroom reno project, and we’ve had some setbacks.
We were supposed to start painting our bathroom this week. We bought the paint and prepped the walls, but didn't make it any further.
The purple paint colour we chose is “too brown” so now we’ve got three samples on the wall and are dragging family and friends into the bathroom to ask them which colour they prefer.
And we chipped the mirror when we took it down. It was looking pretty rough anyway, we decided, so now we have to add the purchase of a new one to the budget.
Finally, behind the mirror, we discovered more wallpaper. Groan.
Four years ago, when we first toured our house-to-be, my husband Dean and I barely noticed the outdated wallpaper on the walls. Well, OK, the four by two-and-a-half metre wilderness mural in the living room did make a bit of an impression, but not enough to deter us from buying the house.
As do-it-yourselfers with a little experience under our belts, we were excited about the prospect of digging into the big stuff, like kitchen and basement renos. Wallpaper? Shrug.
We were wrong.
I think we started picking off pieces of wallpaper the day we took possession. A corner here, a strip there. We bought gallons of stripper, tools to put holes in the paper and borrowed a wallpaper steamer too. We were armed and ready.
Friends and relatives, eager to share in the excitement of new home ownership, arrived to help. But many dollars and person-hours later, most of the paper was still on the wall.
It stayed that way for months. We moved on to other, more satisfying, projects while the front hall of our house continued to look like one of those dingy drug dealer apartments on Law & Order. Meanwhile, my kids and husband amused themselves by drawing on the woodsy mural.
Winter came and we were trapped in the house, facing those bleak walls and short of funds to tackle any big projects. On one particularly grey day, Dean mentioned that somebody told him fabric softener helps remove wallpaper. It was worth a try.
We bought a couple of bottles. Total cost? Less than $10.
We poured about a litre of the softener into a two-litre pop bottle, added a little water to thin, capped it with a trigger from an old spray bottle and started dousing the walls.
To our amazement, it worked! While I still have no idea what chemicals are in fabric softener, I do know that they do a wonderful job of dissolving old wallpaper adhesive.
And that big wilderness scene on the living room wall? Gone in less than an hour.
The only frustrating part of the entire exercise was finding out afterward that Dean had heard about the fabric softener idea years ago. He just never thought it would actually work.
Needless to say, we’ll be mixing up a bottle of fabric softener/wallpaper remover this weekend. Once the paper’s gone and the new accent paint colour chosen, we can get back to our original plan.
Meanwhile, the cabinet drawer fronts and doors have arrived and the flooring retailer called to say that we can pick up our order, so things are starting to come together nicely. That means we may yet get this project finished before the holiday season is fully upon us!