Stephen Caldwell's Space » Interior Design

Extreme Home Makeover: Boston Edition Pt. 3.5

Stephen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 02:31:40 +0000

I’m finally finished, for various definitions of the term “finished”. I’ve got the bulk of the paper off my walls. It took all day, but I managed to get the remaining two walls done today.

I’m exhausted now. I could just fall over and not wake up until some time tomorrow afternoon. Unfortunately, I have some clean up to do before I can pass out. Some time during this week I’ll have to take a utility knife and a scraper around the edges, around door frames and such (because the intelligent person who painted the door frames had never heard of using painter’s tape and so they got paint on the walls and so now there is a lot of latex mess around the edges of the room) and spend some time getting the paper from around outlets and such. And then I can hopefully move on to the next step: patching the cracks in the plaster and applying the skim coat.

Extreme Home Makeover: Boston Edition Pt. 3

Stephen — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:55:16 +0000

This has been a most excellent day. I managed to do an entire wall in about four hours instead of all weekend. I’d continue, but like last weekend I have plans later tonight so I’m going to clean up a bit and get ready to head out. I expect that tomorrow I’ll be able to strip another wall, possibly even a wall and a half if goes fast enough and there are enough hours in the day. There are a couple of pictures after the jump.

Here’s a photo of my ugly wall after I had performed some preliminary stripping using a chemical stripper:

Here is my ugly wall after it’s been steamed:

Here’s the steamer:

And here’s the steamed second wall and some other clutter:

Extreme Home Makeover: Boston Edition Pt. 2.5

Stephen — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:13:41 +0000

It took me an entire weekend to steam one wall. I was hoping to at least get half of the room done by end of day Sunday, but between the technical difficulties yesterday, my friends birthday party, and my being really tired all day today there wasn’t much of a chance to really get down and dirty with the wallpaper. Well, next weekend is looking to be less eventful so hopefully I can make some significant progress.

I’ll put up some photos of my progress when I get closer to finished.

Extreme Home Makeover: Boston Edition Pt. 2

Stephen — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 22:30:47 +0000

I wish that I could go back in time and find the person who invented wallpaper and beat him/her with a crowbar.

I rented a wallpaper steamer and I was thought that, “I’ll get there when they open so I’ll have nearly all day to steam and scrape” and of course Murphy’s Law decided to show itself. Apparently someone thought it’d be a good idea to crimp the hose shut. I thought that the pan (the big thing with holes that you hold against the wall) was blocked and I drove back to Watertown to get a new pan, but when I returned and the same lack of steam was occurring I realized that it was in fact something wrong with the steamer. So I drove back to Watertown again and the guy at the rental place fixed the hose and I could come home again and start steaming. All in all, four hours wasted. I didn’t finally get around to getting something started until about 2:30-3:00 and I didn’t have a whole lot of time since my friend’s birthday gathering is taking place later tonight. So, I’ve managed to get about an 18 inch strip of bare wall. That took the better part of an hour to do. This is definitely an all day project, so hopefully I’m not hung over tomorrow and I can get up fairly early and have it done. If not, then I’ll just have to try and finish it the weekend after Thanksgiving.

The upsetting thing about this is that the underlying wall isn’t in the best shape. It’s an old plaster wall and it’s quite pockmarked with divots and holes and what not. I feel that the only way that I could paint over it and not see all the holes would be to basically cover the entire wall in a layer of plaster. I am not enthused about doing that, so that leaves me with…putting…up…more…wallpaper. It will be on a bare wall, though, instead of on probably 50 years worth of old not-well-adhered wallpaper.

Extreme Home Makeover: Boston Edition Pt. 1

Stephen — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 23:36:33 +0000

Oi. So after two years and a few months I’ve finally decided to do something with the walls in my apartment. My bedroom is covered in ugly pink flowery wallpaper. It’s not particularly appropriate for an up and coming twenty something male. I have taken on the task of removing the wallpaper and a crappy task it is. There are 4 layers of paper, three of which are flowery pink, over what appears to be a plaster wall. I’ve only just started about 3 hours ago from this post and my progress thus far is minimal. This is easily a several day all-day task. I’ll probably end up working on this till next weekend. Hopefully, I’ll be able to asses whether making repairs and painting or whether I should just repaper the walls (properly) this time. Whoever papered over the wall previously definitely did a half-assed job. Hopefully this gets easier as it goes on.

I’m very tempted to just rent a steamer.