“It’s not that bad. I can fix that.”
In each house I’ve renovated, my eyes and hands have traversed every square inch of it. There is no corner I haven’t been on hand and knees or ladder, scrutinizing, scrubbing, sweeping, and eventually stripping, sanding, painting or shining.
You get really familiar with the topography of a house. You may spend just a few seconds on any given square inch or you might need a lot more, but literally speaking, nothing is overlooked.
My first inclination when looking at a wall is to repair it if it is repairable. That’s probably my dad whispering in my ear. Tearing out a wall generates a staggering quantity of landfill material that has to be dealt with: stored somewhere, schlepped into a truck, hauled to a big hole in the ground, and the privilege of chucking it in that hole paid for. Easier to repair than replace? Obviously it depends, but man, I’ve saved a few walls that would make the average HGTV viewer take to TikTok.
In a 1940’s era home we bought, the first impression of walking in was, “my Heavens, what have I done?” The shag carpet spoke of decades of abuse (easily undone on day 1– see previous blog post) but the walls. Goodness. The walls had stories, a legacy, even. Well-intentioned owners and tenants had layered onto those walls like one might layer over a Super Bowl bean dip, each layer meant to conceal the sins beneath. These walls had four layers of wallpaper. Underneath all of that was plaster which in some areas fell freely to the ground without encouragement. A wiser man may have called in the dogs, but I set to scraping.
I spent an entire week scraping wallpaper in a single room. Because I like to do things the hard way, I was using hot water mixed with vinegar sprayed onto the walls and scraped with a 2” wide blade. Having shut the water off a few weeks prior to save money, I was heading to Barbara’s house every couple hours (thank you, Barbara) next door to retrieve buckets of hot water. As the water would cool I would, like an ostrich might, deny that my progress was slowing and push on. In an even greater exercise in futility I resorted to hauling gallons of water from home over to the house so that I didn’t have to bug Barbara as much.
Also in the holster was a scoring tool which sort of resembles an agricultural combine, except more ergonomically correct. You pass the thing all over your wallpapered surface and it makes tiny little cuts, into which hot water or a wallpaper stripper solution can soak. These make life simpler, but are terrible when left on the floor, spike side up, and stepped upon.
Scraping wallpaper is like a war of attrition. It will break you. It’s just a matter of how much of the wallpaper you’ll get off before it does so. Even if you do get “all of it” off, you’ll have thousands of tiny divots made into the surface of the wall that will need to be repaired later with some lightweight spackle, which will also need to be sanded smooth and primed. There will be moments when you just want to throw up your hands and find the nearest sledgehammer and get on with the demolition and resign yourself to installing new drywall.
Only AFTER a week of scraping did I bite the bullet and order a wallpaper steamer. I progressed through the remaining rooms (a kitchen and bedroom) a fair bit more quickly and was reminded of a truth I’ve always held: I’m a slow learner. That should be the subtitle of all of my writing, if we’re being honest. Countless times I’ve convinced myself that instead of running home to get the right tool for the job, or order it and have it in a few days, I could muscle through with some inferior (or just wrong) tool.
The wallpaper job on California Street was a classic example of flip renovation purgatory. Familiar territory. A demonstration of how lonely the work can feel when it’s not going well and there is no way but forward, but forward really stinks. When it was done I vowed to never strip wallpaper again. I even posted the steamer on Facebook Marketplace.
Thankfully it didn’t sell because… guess what? Two years later, I excavated that thing from deep behind a bunch of other tools and steeled myself to do it all over again in our next flip project house.
This time, I was removing just one layer of wallpaper and let’s just say that if we are talking about the mathematics involved, one layer is exponentially easier to remove than four. Ironically, the wallpaper being removed was really quite beautiful— a textured weave of bamboo fiber that clearly was high quality. Back in the glory days of the seventies, someone paid a lot for it.
Still, it had to go. As is usually the case this time was much easier. I was starting, not finishing, the job with the right tool. I also discovered that purgatory, while often inevitable, diminishes in duration with experience. This is true in wallpaper and in life more broadly.