Schoolhouse Renos

We're not particularly fond on wallpaper, which is too bad because all of the rooms on the second floor of the schoolhouse are covered in it (including the landing at the top of the stairs). It wasn't bad wallpaper, light with small blue "spatters", but we just prefer plain old paint. Last year, I started the long process of removing paper and repainting - one room at a time. With wallpaper you never know what will happen until you raise a scraper and start trying to get it off. Sometimes it's easy, and other times a nightmare. This job was the latter. Whoever hung the paper upstairs did a great job, with all of the angles and curves. What they failed to do was put a nice layer of paint between the drywall and the paper, making it very difficult to remove. One by one, the rooms were stripped, repaired, and repainted in the off season between winter and summer. Since the paper was glued directly to the drywall, a lot of repair was needed after scraping it off. Most rooms required a skim coat over about 1/2 of the wall. Poor mudding technique resulted in a lot of mud on the wall that needed to be sanded off, raising a lot of dust.

  

Once the dirty job was done, painting seemed easy. Unlike when he was younger, BL actually helped finish the painting job quicker by helping.  Here he demonstrates how to paint a wooden slate wall.