Bungle Oh No!: Honey, I think I blew up the Dining Room!

Wallpaper

It seems like such a great design decision at the time. Then you paint over it.. Or maybe paper over it.. Then you sell the house to some guy named Emilio and laugh as you drive away.

I like wallpaper, I really do. I just don't like tar covered 1930s wallpaper that was painted over. Or horrible plate rails that aren't really plate rails (they have grooves...for you know...plates) but actually two pieces of base moulding that were tacked together and slapped up onto the wall of my dining room right at eye level such that it makes the room feel shorter than it is and makes the giant dining room windows look funny.

So I did what anyone else would do. I TORE IT ALL OUT IN A FIT OF RAGE!!! Well.. what really happened was that Becky and I went to the Serv-U Locksmiths over in Springfield to get some copies of the skeleton keys we have (the only keys we have for the house) made. While there we met their "wallpaper guy" who upon learning of our desire to remove wallpaper from plaster walls informed us to go against all commonly given advice and not use wallpaper remover or water or anything like that but to instead dry scrape it with a wall stripper he had, basically a 4in razorblade on a handle).

We got home new toys in hand and this happened...

Well it wasn't exactly THAT easy. It was definitely my fault though. I had the great idea to see how well it worked. I pulled the wall stripper out of the package and slid the blade under an edge that had come up. I was met with a satisfying SCHHHTTTTT sound and a long ribbon of wallpaper which had come up without leaving much if any residue on the wall. It was all downhill from there. We didn't take as many pictures as I'd like but here is the basic run down of events. Oh... I also ripped down the horrible ceiling tiles while we were dismantling the room.

For reference.. here is a before picture

And so it began....

Sully didn't quite understand what was happening.

As I got close to the ceiling I decided I should also pull the tiles down.

Pulling the tiny sad excuse for a crown moulding revealed both the original ceiling tile color and wallpaper pattern. One note about the crown moulding. Not only was it totally dinky but it was installed using every improper method one could conceive. The corners were just inside 45's which left a nasty shadow line instead of being properly coped to prevent that. The lengths of the boards were fairly random and instead of scarfing the joints they just butt the ends of the boards together. Totally amateur and ugly.... basically par for the course when it comes to anything that wasn't built into the house originally.