With a few of our rooms finally starting to take shape and our inability to finish a project or room before starting another, we spent the weekend stripping the wallpaper in our dining room.
On the pictures it really doesn’t look too bad, but in real life, the walls are dirty, marked and a really just really grimy.
The bright white paint around the built-in shelves and light switch really doesn’t help make the rest of the wall look any better. If there’s one DIY job we’ve learned in this house it’s how to strip walls and woodwork.
Whilst it’s not the most exciting of jobs (you can read about our method for stripping wallpaper here), it is strangely satisfying to see the dirty paper disappear from the wall.
About half way through stripping the walls, I realised that it’s the last room in the house that still has wallpaper! Okay, so technically some of the kitchen is still wallpapered, but the work required in there is so extensive, that we’ll pretty much be starting from scratch.
Bizarrely I actually find the rough plastered wall much prettier than the papered one. Yes, it’s rough, but at least it’s not pretending to be something it’s not.
Don’t worry though, we’ve not gone completely mad, we’re planning on having half of the room skimmed as soon as possible.
What were you up to this weekend? Did you do any DIY? Do you have wallpaper in your home or do you prefer smooth plastered walls like us?
Oh…this weekend…not that exciting…a few trips to the skip, sorting out a divider wall in the hallway and clearing the garden..all those kind of great weekend activities with the family;)
Thanks again for great inspiration and lots of useful information! Take care x
Wow, that sounds like you had one busy weekend, Camilla! We had a few trips to the skip planned, too… decided to put our feet up instead.
Cx
I *hate* wallpaper of all kinds as I’m convinced you can see the joins within a year or two, no matter how well it is put up. So we’re stripping every single room of wallpaper, too, and disappointingly it looks like almost all the rooms will require skimming :( boo! We were hoping to avoid that expense but no such luck.
I agree with you that the rough plaster looks better than the old wallpaper!
We did zero DIY this weekend… just too busy doing other things :(
Good to hear that we’re not the only ones that don’t like wallpaper! Annoyingly all of our walls will need skimming – which really isn’t cheap, but in the rooms we’ve done so far it has made a huge difference.
It’s good to take a weekend off from DIY every now and then! We can’t all be super efficient all of the time, can we?!
Cx
I feel your pain… We spent 10 hours stripping one room last week and the plaster just fell off the walls. We have to get it all skimmed and now the double glazing was fitted this weekend (yay!) we now have bare brick too.
We also cleared out the garden at the weekend and had over 20 bags plus other rubbish that went to the tip. I feel this will be never ending. I am having no luck getting much paint off the cast iron fireplace which is 4 paint layers thick.
Another week off work in April to try and get two rooms of wood chip wall paper off!
Cat
Wow! I feel tired just reading about all you accomplished. We stripped two of our fireplaces, one using Peel Away, and loved it! In case you haven’t seen it, you can check our post about out here.
Good luck with the wood chip!
Cx
I still have so much wall paper in the cottage! But the dining-room one is gone, like yours. The walls are unfinished, like yours, and like you, I like them better this way than with awful wallpaper.
Haha, so relieved, thought I was going mad thinking that damaged stripped walls were better than wallpaper. Good to know I’m not the only one!
Cx