Kathy Strips In Front of the Neighbors

Oh, is Christmas over? It must be time to get back to work on the house!

Kathy wasted no time in demolishing the old wallpaper in the three main rooms downstairs. No sooner had our family/guests left than she took a scraper to the wallpaper. In fact, she started before they all left.

The three main rooms downstairs were all painted the same color of "bordello red" back in the 1990s when this space was used as a restaurant. Color analysts (I guess that's a real thing) say that red is a good color for digestion, hence its use in restaurant dining rooms. We never liked the color all that much -- what goes with dark red walls? But we also had more pressing matters to attend to. Until now.

Fortunately for us, the original plaster walls had never been painted, not in all the 120+ years they've been standing. Instead, they'd always been wallpapered (probably several different times), and sometimes that wallpaper was painted over, as in this case. So instead of red walls, we really had red-painted wallpaper. Once Kathy started scraping away the old wallpaper, the original plaster was exposed.

That was the good news. The bad news was, the wallpaper had been glued down pretty well, so it came off in little bitty pieces about the size of a business card. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Multiply that times four walls and three rooms and you begin to get an idea of the task ahead of her.

After several weeks of this, all three rooms are finally done. There are a few stubborn little bits of paper that still cling to odd corners here and there, but for the most part the rooms are back to their natural state. We'll be papering them again. So now all we have to do is pick out the new wallpaper. Simple, right?