The Historic District

Today, I painted my kitchen cupboards. Third time in two days. Colour still wrong. Day cupboards are a different colour than evening cupboards. Gave up, played Alt J on loop and drank pink wine. Consider the day seized.

Carpe Vino!

Sympathies on the color issues.

Manalto wrote:
High-style Craftsman! In the little door on the mantle, are the windows mica?

No it's a green marbled slag type glass. Amazing that survived but not the side of the door.

Olson185 wrote:
So, instead, I pulled poison ivy (again), though there was very little, and then I started pulling English (or whatever) ivy that has encroached 10'-20' into the yard from the perimeter (most of it originates in our neighbours' yards).

Oh god, the poison ivy in my backyard has gone absolutely nuts! I have been spraying it but I have no idea how to completely eradicate it?!? I got it really badly last month and am just now healing up from that!

Lily left the valley wrote:I can't imagine what it's like to be working with the windows of time you have. I've been going batty just over the rain here, and this is our only home.

Knowing I had a limited amount of time was a great incentive in the beginning but now, three weeks later, that urgency has waned and I've started dawdling. I know I'll regret not having taken advantage of the time available, so I'm trying to push myself to get things done.

Yesterday I found a pair of adjustable screen-door hinges (the spring-loaded kind) on eBay that were, coincidentally, right here in Mobile - and a great deal. (I didn't even use the "nearest" filter!) so I met the seller, appropriately, in the Habitat for Humanity parking lot to get them. New-old-stock, complete with matching screws and adjusting tool for $12. When I met him, he threw in another pair of screen-door hinges (the most common kind) for free.

Determined to get some paint on the house, I planned to start painting again in the afternoon but a cloudburst dampened that plan, so I removed the big fig tree growing at the corner of the house. I did this with great regret, especially since I've been coddling a dinky fig tree up in Connecticut (Zone 6) for years, protecting it in the winter, only to get three or four measly figs from it. This tree in Zone 8 produced so many figs that I almost got bored with them. But it was too big, too close to the house and in too much shade - and there's another one on the other side of the yard. Judging by their apparently random positioning, I think the birds may be planting them.

Scraping the depressing, sometimes rubbery, dark brown paint-on-wallpaper proved to be pretty slow going. Scoring the surface with the Paper Tiger tool and spraying a hot water and fabric softener mixture had no significant effect other than to make things wet and messy, and fill the room with that peculiar, artificial odor. Some areas flake right off and some are completely resistant - the rest requires tedious, escape-from-Alcatraz chipping, with glacial progress. I look forward to solving this wallpaper-removal puzzle and seeing just the raw plaster walls, mellowed with age. I may leave them that way and paint the trim white.

319 Scraping LR wall by James McInnis, on Flickr

James, a friend of mine bought a wall paper steamer and she really liked it....just a thought!

A rental place may have an industrial steamer with more oomph than what can be bought for DIY'ers ? Can anyone else here offer a comparison ? The industrial steamer I used had a big kettle that seemed about 4x as big as the home models.

Wallpaper steaming took up a chunk of my previous life, after starting out with scraping the loose stuff off, scoring it, using some kind of neutralizer that didn't work. Steaming it is tedious but really works to get down to bare plaster.

One awful BUT, though: if there are layers of oil paint on the wallpaper, it's harder for the steam to penetrate. You may need to resort to scoring, then steaming ?

It is a hot, humid and messy task that you might want to save for the cooler months ahead ?

The job will definitely wait until the cooler months. Someone told me just this weekend that he tried a steamer on painted wallpaper and it had zero effect, even after scoring the paint. Perhaps the oomph of a commercial steamer is what is needed.The only way to find out if it will work in my situation is to try. Surely others here have had to remove painted wallpaper, yes?

I removed lots of it from my house. I scraped many small holes in it down to the plaster then soaked them with a warm water/fabric softener solution. I let it sit a while and then scraped. It's still tedious but it seemed to work better than a paper tiger. Have fun!

I have never used a steamer, and have always gone with the perforate and soak (for hours, rewetting) in order to remove paper. I have not had to deal with paper that has been painted though (fortunately)