Glass half-empty.
Why, oh why did I start this:
It took me approx 2.5 hours to get to this point. Screw Dif gel. What a mess. From the looks of the floor you would have thought I had been carving wood. Fine shavings of what was once wallpaper lay at my feet. The old wallpaper(s) is/are quite beautiful though. I'm almost sorry I took it back to the plaster in some areas. My goal is to strip the whole room down to this stage, at which point I will decide if I need a solid studio wall or if I'll glaze over the remains. Silly me, I thought I would apply the wallpaper stripper and voilá, the paper would peel off in huge slabs just like in the illustration.
Glass half-full.
Hey, I just started a new room-size wall installation painting:
As I was packing up the fancy decanters and other evidence of the high life, it occurred to me that I could paint some maroon stripes every 14 inches and have a new wallpaper. But let's not stop there, it also occurred to me I could distill some of the motifs and paint large facsimiles of those motifs on top of the wallpaper remains. At which point, this became the beginning of a 4-wall installation painting.
5 comments:
They made some pretty good glue back in the day.
I've done what you're doing four times in my life. Nasty and frustrating. Never did it the same way twice. Don't do the steamer method either, not on the old stuff, it gets everything soooooo wet and still only comes of in ribbons.
What ever happened to coffee break skypeing?
I thought about a steamer because I thought it might work double duty to clean my floors, which I can never seem to get clean, but at $99, I held out. Jeesh. Ribbons would be fine. After it dried and I had to reapply, it came off in shavings. SHAVINGS.
Oh right. The isolation thing. Perhaps Video Coffee Break on Skype or iChat should be resurrected. I'm still good for my 2PM espresso, CST. I'll try and remember to leave it open.
If you do paint over, with stripes or whatever (great idea I think), you need to make sure all traces of glue residue are gone. Use a garden sprayer with hot water, and keep wiping with a sponge/scrubby. Let dry. Tape your stripes and then use an oil based primer (2nd choice is "Guardz", waterbased and pretty effective). Without the primer, whatever residue is still left will bubble your paint and this will dry into a hard craterous mess which will make the paper removal seem like kid's play by comparison.
Most contractors don't bid wallpaper removal, they charge time and materials.
Cheers!
Oh dear god.
It is do-able though. You just really do want to get that paste off, and you can tell - if the wall's still slimely when you wet it, it has too much paste. The oil (or guardz) primer is an added protection. So do both, and you are fine.
When removing, try removing from a different direction. Sometimes the paper will rip to pieces from one direction, but hold together from another.
Or just install drywall over it :-)
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