Ways in which I am mad
So, to recap, on Thursday my friend Z. is coming to slap a couple of coats of paint on my bedroom wall. This is not intended to be a proper decorating job, just a stopgap measure to tide me over until we can afford to get the room properly done up. My job is to clear the room and get the painting things out. I can do this. I have already started doing the 'clearing things out' part.
Unfortunately Z. made the fatal mistake of saying "if you get the time and you have the energy, you could start painting over the various paint swatches on the wall because they'll take more than two coats to cover". Now, to a normal person this means 'paint out the paint swatches'. To me however it somehow translated as 'you know what would be an excellent idea? Stripping off the wallpaper! No really, that would be a great thing to do when you have to have everything ready for the painting on Thursday!'
So it was that last night at about 10.30, I dragged Cat down to the basement to retrieve the steam wallpaper stripper and promptly set about stripping off the admittedly very ugly and extremely damaged textured wallpaper. The textured wallpaper comes off surprisingly easily. Unfortunately there's another layer of what I thought was very shiny paint but turns out to be very shiny paint on ancient lining paper. This does not come off so easily but because I am a) obsessive and b) stupid, I gave it the old college try. After an hour or so of successfully peeling off wallpaper it occurred to me that instead of a selection of small patches of bright paint that needed painting over a couple of times, I now had most of a bare plaster wall that needed sealing before it could be painted.
Er, that would be an 'oops' then.
In my defence, the paint was so shiny that it didn't look to me as though an ecological water-based emulsion would have gone over it very well. And it had already started coming off a bit because unsurprisingly, it had got wet from the steam. And really, if you're using a steamer on wallpaper, you can't just decide to stop at one layer because then you wind up painting over wet paper, which seems like a great way to end up with damp and mould. See, see how I justify my madness!
Of course, a sane person wouldn't have started stripping the wallpaper in the first bloody place...
Today I've done another hour or so of wallpaper stripping and I'm a bit knackered. In a small fit of something approaching sanity, I am absolutely finishing the wall I'm on before I tackle either of the other two (fortunately the last wall is entirely covered with built in wardrobes and a large window and has no visible wallpaper). And I'm allowing myself to not do the other walls if it looks like an impossible task timewise. From places where the wallpaper has already come off, I don't think the other walls have the lining paper but I could be wrong about that and I'm going to finish prepping the wall I'm working on before I investigate.
Unfortunately Z. made the fatal mistake of saying "if you get the time and you have the energy, you could start painting over the various paint swatches on the wall because they'll take more than two coats to cover". Now, to a normal person this means 'paint out the paint swatches'. To me however it somehow translated as 'you know what would be an excellent idea? Stripping off the wallpaper! No really, that would be a great thing to do when you have to have everything ready for the painting on Thursday!'
So it was that last night at about 10.30, I dragged Cat down to the basement to retrieve the steam wallpaper stripper and promptly set about stripping off the admittedly very ugly and extremely damaged textured wallpaper. The textured wallpaper comes off surprisingly easily. Unfortunately there's another layer of what I thought was very shiny paint but turns out to be very shiny paint on ancient lining paper. This does not come off so easily but because I am a) obsessive and b) stupid, I gave it the old college try. After an hour or so of successfully peeling off wallpaper it occurred to me that instead of a selection of small patches of bright paint that needed painting over a couple of times, I now had most of a bare plaster wall that needed sealing before it could be painted.
Er, that would be an 'oops' then.
In my defence, the paint was so shiny that it didn't look to me as though an ecological water-based emulsion would have gone over it very well. And it had already started coming off a bit because unsurprisingly, it had got wet from the steam. And really, if you're using a steamer on wallpaper, you can't just decide to stop at one layer because then you wind up painting over wet paper, which seems like a great way to end up with damp and mould. See, see how I justify my madness!
Of course, a sane person wouldn't have started stripping the wallpaper in the first bloody place...
Today I've done another hour or so of wallpaper stripping and I'm a bit knackered. In a small fit of something approaching sanity, I am absolutely finishing the wall I'm on before I tackle either of the other two (fortunately the last wall is entirely covered with built in wardrobes and a large window and has no visible wallpaper). And I'm allowing myself to not do the other walls if it looks like an impossible task timewise. From places where the wallpaper has already come off, I don't think the other walls have the lining paper but I could be wrong about that and I'm going to finish prepping the wall I'm working on before I investigate.