Wallpaper-Free!

I started to write a post the other day to update everyone on all that we’ve been up to lately, but after writing some of it I fell asleep on the couch while I was feeding the baby, so I’ll have to finish writing that and post it later on.

I just had to take a quick minute to say that our kitchen is now officially wallpaper-free!!! After 8+ hours of working on it today, I finished. Now the only thing left to do before I can start painting in there is to remove the floor boards – I really didn’t want to take them off (I thought I could just use painter’s tape to cover them while I painted) but the wallpaper was put up before the floor boards were, which means that there are little pieces of wallpaper sticking out all along the floorboards, so we’ll have to take them off to remove those last little scraps of paper. But then we’ll be all ready to paint! It already makes the room look bigger to get rid of that busy fruit pattern. I’m excited to have made so much progress on that major part of the house projects. Now we only have 2 more rooms with wallpaper, but they should take a lot less time since both of them only have a small wallpaper border around the ceiling – which should be a piece of cake compared to removing it from around all the windows and cupboards in the kitchen. Actually, the wallpaper removal wasn’t nearly as hard as people made it out to be, it was just time consuming to get all the little pieces around the counters and windows. After getting a lot of suggestions on how to remove it, I decided not to wait until we could borrow a steamer from someone and I tried the vinegar method that so many people have suggested. Then I decided to try it with plain water instead of a water/vinegar mixture, and it worked just as well (and smelled a lot better). So after spraying water and scraping off the paper from the whole room and then cleaning up all the little scraps from the whole floor, I am definitely ready for bed now that it’s almost 1:30 in the morning (I hope the kids allow me to get some sleep in the morning). Good night.