The wallpaper is not that bad.
This in my new philosophy, and it will stand firm, no matter how bad the wallpaper may be. The wallpaper could be hideous . . . it could be streams and fishing poles, and you are an ardent PETA granola eating fruitcake which means that you find the wallpaper offensive. Even so, the wallpaper is not that bad. It could be too dark, some sort of nearly black faux wood paneling wallpaper, and it gives your house the ambience of a cave, and makes you feel lethargic and depressed and suicidal every morning when you wake up, so that you don’t even get out of bed, you lose your job, you gain 400 pounds, and your family abandons you. Even so, the wallpaper is not that bad. It could be more of a mural, something Rubenesque that vaguely reminds you of Leda and the Swan, and causes you to feel liscentious and a tad bit loose with your morals. Even so . . . the wallpaper is not that bad.
Our wallpaper situation involved grapes, inoffensive grape vines curling about in festive ways all over our kitchen walls. I kind of liked the grapes. They seemed wholesome and appropriate, so that a sense of bounty and goodness surrounded me while I cooked. They would have been horribly inappropriate in the childrens’ playroom, for obvious reasons, but it was the kitchen. The grapes were okay.
Ashlei hated the grapes.
So, I went out and bought paint, and set about to take the wallpaper off of the walls. I had not yet learned my lesson, that the wallpaper is not that bad.
It took me perhaps five hours to peel the grapes off of our walls. Some of the wallpaper came off in long sheets, and this was the easiest. But too much of it came off in 1 square inch sections. I used a razor blade to peel up the corners of the wallpaper, and I worked very carefully so as to not gouge the wall behind the grapes. In working very carefully to avoiding gouging the wall, I found it impossible to simultaneously work very carefully to avoid slicing my fingers. So I bled frequently on the grapes. This was no great loss; Ashlei reminded me that they were headed to the trash, so whether or not they got blood stained was not much of an issue.
But even so, it vexed me to be continuously bleeding.
After the wallpaper was all off, and after I was no longer dripping, I realized that wallpaper is not all that goes onto the wall when wallpaper goes onto the wall. There is another layer. It looks like paper, and it has a lot of glue in it.
Steve . . . remember Steve the contractor? Steve is not my friend . . . Steve gave me very bad advice . . . Steve lied to me. He told me to sand it off.
I have a vibrating sander. I hate my vibrating sander. First of all, the sander is loud, and you have to hold it while it runs, right there in front of you. You can’t sand from another room. Also, the sander vibrates. That means that it turns your nerves, skin, muscles, tendons, bones, and internal organs into jelly. And finally, the sander is not well designed, as far as keeping the sandpaper attached. I averaged about 60 seconds of sanding for every 60 seconds of reattaching the sandpaper. Actually, it was worse than that . . . it went like this:
1. Sand! (1 minute)
2. Sandpaper falls off of the vibrating sander! (1 minute)
3. I yell vague threats and imprecations! (1 minute)
4. I reattach sandpaper onto vibrating sander! (1 minute)
repeat these steps 17,400 times.
You might notice that, for every 4 minutes spent on this process, only 1 minute is spent actually sanding.
Another bad thing about sanding: while it won’t work to do what you are wanting it to do, which is get rid of that underlayment glue paper, it does manage to spew several gallons of dust into the air. So, if you want to breathe while you are sanding, you will have to time your breaths between your sneezes.
The vibrating sander did no good at all. I sanded for many many hours, and the underlayment glue paper was still there. it was very smooth underlayment glue paper, but it was not gone at all. Also, every single piece of furniture in the entire house was now covered with dust. Also, I was sneezing so hard that I was dislodging my eyeballs right out of my head. Also, all of the body that I have above my sternum was vibrated into a shivering bag of jelly.
Ashlei encouraged me to “keep on keepin on.”
Inspired by her stellar see-it-to-the-end attitude (which she transmitted to me from Oklahoma, where she was hiding while I did these things), I decided to see if I could just paint right over the underlayment glue paper.
This turns out not to be a good idea. The underlayment glue paper, while impervious to a vibrating sander, does not do well with the moisture in paint. What they need to do down there at Lowes, instead of dithering around and trying to sell dead tree pieces and caulk, is invent a dry paint.
Because wet paint doesn’t work at all. The minute I put it on, it started causing that underlayment glue paper to bubble up.
So, I stopped painting, and then my natural brilliance realized something. The vibrating sander can’t get the underlayment glue paper to separate from the wall, even if you sand it for several dozens of hours. But put some liquid on it, and it starts separating. So I decided to put more liquid on it. I checked out our collection of sprayers, and we had a variety. I started out with the Raid. I sprayed all of it, and it worked! All I had to do was spray each section of underlayment glue paper until it dripped, wait about 3 minutes, spray it again until it dripped, and then the underlayment glue paper scraped right off with a trowel! Unfortunately, I quickly ran out of Raid. But we had a spray bottle of turpentine, which also worked nicely. When that ran out, I found a bottle of Kerosene. It wasn’t in a spray bottle, so I just sloshed it up there on the walls. That underlayment glue paper peeled right off. Then, I used paint thinner, and carbolic acid, and oxyethylene, and diesel, and at the end, I was using a mixture of hydrogenated chlorine and sodium pentothal.
This took 46.9 hours. I lost all of the skin on my hands and arms, suffered uncontrollable shakings, and frothed at the mouth.
The underlayment glue paper, being glue paper, fell onto the floor of my kitchen, where it promptly dried out and turned into a congealed mass that was permanently bonded to the floor. Having run out of chemicals, I am at a loss on how to get it off.
At this point on the process, I have scraped, square inch at a time, the grapes out of my kitchen. I have poured a gallon of my blood out upon these grapes. I have vibrated my body into a moaning mass of miserable flesh. I have filled my house with the dust of a thousand deserts. I have saturated the sheetrock that still stands in my kitchen with a cornucopia of toxic fumes. I have turned into a near dead shadow of my formerly healthy self.
The wall needs to be textured. I have spent, now, around 6,943 hours working in my kitchen. I have not yet begun to paint.
I cried.
