Slow Transformation Part I: Removing Wallpaper

Since moving into our house almost four years ago, we've spent every summer and almost every winter break redoing some part of the house. We removed carpet and painted the baby's room when we first moved in, we redid the upstairs bathrooms our first full summer in the house, we transformed the guest room into Sam's big boy room, we added a banquette to the kitchen. This summer, we're attempting our largest renovation yet on the downstairs den.

The den has wonderfully plush, plaid carpet that Joy's wanted to go since the moment we moved in. However, it has been great for crawlers and learning walkers and nice and warm in the winter, so we've kept it all this time. Now that Noah is starting to walk, though, it's time for the carpet to go. So we're going to redo the downstairs bath and den with new floors, new paint, new fixtures, maybe new furniture, and I'm going to catalog it so when all is said and done in a month, we can see how far we've come.

I started the process last night by removing wallpaper in the bathroom. The previous owners had a thing for bad wallpaper in the bathroom, but no such much of a thing that they wallpapered the entire bathroom. No, only the top portion of the bathrooms received treatment:

The picture on the left is the upstairs bathroom when we moved in and the one on the right is the downstairs bathroom I'm currently working on. Upstairs, the wallpaper was applied directly to the drywall - that was a fun week of removal and patching, let me tell you. Happily, downstairs the wallpaper was applied to paint, so it came off fairly easily last night:





As you can see, the wall is in pretty good shape, so I mainly had to patch nail holes hidden under the wallpaper and strange dents that have been there who knows how long. So the next step will be to prime that deep blue so we can cover it up when we paint. I'll let you know how that goes tonight.