Magical Cat's Corner

Home Improvement

I'm feeling the irresistible pull of home improvement again. It's that feeling you get when you just have to tackle a project. So I'm trying to decide what to do. There are many things in our house to work on... new carpet or hardwood floors downstairs, removing the master bedroom wallpaper, replacing the faulty screen door, covering the cement slab we call a patio with flagstone or a deck, painting the trim... the list goes on and on.

When we first moved into our house (coming up on 4 years ago), my husband, James, and I did not know what we were in for. Every room in the house had ugly, 80's style wallpaper. It's easy enough to walk through and say "yeah, I can re-do that" when you're looking for a house to buy, but we had to change almost every single room in the house. There was even wallpaper in the hallways. So we transformed the house, room by room. With my dad's help, we stripped the wallpaper, sanded the walls, and painted. We put up wallpaper in one room, which is our downstairs 1/2 bath. It is one of my favorite rooms that we have done. Only one room remains wallpapered in an 80's design, and that's our master bedroom. It's the least offensive pattern of the many lovely designs that graced our walls. I won't be able to paint it until I have my baby, but oh well, what's another 6 months of looking at it.

I often wish I had chronicled our projects and created a scrapbook with before and after pictures. I could have saved the wallpaper pieces to show just how stylish the house was before. Here, I will attempt to revisit each project.

Fall 2000
Wow! We are home owners! The first room we tackled is the guest bedroom. It had wide blue and brown striped wallpaper with a border that had birds flying. It looked like a grandfather's bedroom. My dad showed me a process of removing wallpaper using a round scoring tool that makes holes all over the paper and then using a pump up sprayer full of hot water and DIFF. You soak the walls and the paper peels off. It was a bit messy, but it worked. We patched the nail holes in the walls but failed to sand them down, so you can still see the patch marks through the paint. Oh well, we were first timers, so it's ok. We painted the room Finnish Blue. We replaced the red metal mini blinds with white cellular shades. We were impressed with our job, flaws and all.

Winter 2000
On to the next bedroom upstairs. It had been a girl's room and had pastel striped wallpaper with tiny hearts in every pastel color you can think of. Ugh. This wallpaper was perhaps the easiest to remove. I could almost peel it off without using any water or DIFF. I patched the nail holes and sanded them down. I painted the room a light lavender color and put up lace curtains. It looks rather Victorian. I love the room... it currently houses our rabbit, but it will be the baby's room.

Spring 2001
Ah, the downstairs bathroom. Perhaps the most beautiful wallpaper I've ever seen (gag). It had neon criss-crossed stripes with a neon heart border around the mirror. I am not joking. Besides being ugly, it was also extremely stubborn. I think it must have been put up with super glue. No matter how much I scraped and soaked it, it came off in tiny bits that stuck to the floor when I dropped them. In addition to tearing the wallpaper down, which was really fun when I got to the toilet and pedestal sink area, I also decided to take out the white ceramic towel bar and TP holder in favor of a more elegant look. My dad helped me knock these pieces out with a hammer and repair the gaping holes in the dry wall. Dad also helped me hang my replacement wallpaper. It's a scroll design in subtle sage green with a parchment like background. I found a mirror, trash can, and two corner shelves at Pier 1 that have a silver scroll design that matched the wallpaper perfectly. It took me over 2 years to finally hang up the TP holder, but the finished room is awesome.

Summer/Fall 2001
Who puts wallpaper in hallways? That was the question I kept asking myself as I dealt with the most awful of all wallpapers I have encountered. It was a color my dad called "dirty beige". I would say it was the "dusty rose" color so popular in the 80's and it had yellowed over the years. It was in our downstairs hallway, stairwell, and upstairs hallway. The residue this paper left behind was terrible. Most wallpaper glue comes off of the wall with a little dish soap and water, but not this glue. It was like tiny grains of sand super glued to the walls. We had to use sandpaper to sand the walls over and over to get rid of it. We spent hours sanding until the surfaces were smooth enough to paint. We painted them Antique White.

Spring/Summer 2002
Our kitchen and family room are basically one giant room that spans the width of the house. I couldn't wait to tackle these rooms. The wallpaper played tricks with your eyes. It had small greyish diamond shapes, and they would flash when you looked at them. It also had a country blue border in the kitchen and country blue shelves with ducks on them above a planning desk. Those shelves were gone as soon as we moved in, but the holes remained. We had to do a lot of patching in this room, especially when I decided to rip the planning desk out. It left a square of missing linoleum on the floor, so we covered that with a rug until the floor needs to be replaced again. I now have a nice bakers rack where the desk was. We had some difficulty picking out a color since the color would have to go well in the kitchen as well as the family room. We initially were set on purple, but when we brought the paint home and painted some on the wall, it looked like grape Bubble Yum meets Grimace. Back to Lowes. We ended up with Victorian Slate Green. As we painted we joked that it would look like military barracks, but we liked the finished product. It's a dark sage color. I found that red and tan accents go with it very well, so once we hung up some wrought iron candle sconces and art work with red and tan colors, it looked very cozy. Over the last few years, we have replaced each kitchen appliance, so we now have a black stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher. I plan on placing red and tan tile above the kitchen cabinets at some point.

Fall 2002
The entry way (foyer, whatever you want to call it), living room, and dining room are all connected to the stairwell and hallways that we had previously painted Antique White. Before we painted the hallways, you could see three different patterns when you stepped in the door, each of them distinctly different (and ugly). The entry way had a mint green pastel Southwestern print, while the living room and dining room had a pink and light blue flower design. And we musn't forget the dirty beige hallways. Here's the kicker, when we bought the house, one of the "selling points" was that it was professionally decorated. I beg to differ... you may be wondering why we bought the house. We were able to look past the wallpaper and see what it could be. It has an awesome floor to ceiling brick fireplace in the living room, which is a two story room. The house also had nice carpet and parquet flooring. We knew it could be a great house. Anyway...

We removed the wallpaper in the entry way, living room, and dining room. Wow, it looked better already. Since all of these walls were interconnected with the stairwell and hallways, we also painted these rooms Antique White. It really makes the brick fireplace stand out. At this point our downstairs was almost done.

Spring 2003
Only two rooms remain with 80's wallpaper: the master bedroom and bathroom. I decided to do the bathroom first. The wallpaper had a white background with yellow and orange flowers and green foliage. A mint green shower curtain had remained since we moved in. I didn't know what color to use, so I found a shower curtain that I liked and pulled a light blue color out of that. Normally I don't like light blue, but I had seen it in catalogs and thought it might give the bathroom a retro feel. It is 100% improved over what it was, but I'm considering changing it at some point. Our double vanity is quite dated and the bathtub is small, so we may re-do that bathroom again sometime. We'll see.

Summer 2003
One thing had bothered me since we painted our family room and kitchen. The paint lines where the Slate Green met the Antique White in our dining room and hallway doorways were rather sloppy. Yet again, I called upon my dad to help. He helped me pick out wood trim that matched our other trim in the house. He measured and cut the pieces for me. I had fun staining them. Then he hung them up for me. I covered the nails and coated the trim in polyurethane, and it matches our other trim very well. The doorways look finished now, and the dining room looks a little more elegant.

All of those projects took a lot of time and money, not to mention blood, sweat, and tears. Over the last year, we have not started any major projects. To quell our need for home improvement, we have focused on smaller scale projects. I created a flower bed by our patio. We replaced our generic light fixture above the dining room table with a chandelier, and we installed a dimmer switch for it. James installed motion sensing light switches in the garage and upstairs office (which, by the way, was one of the few rooms that didn't have wallpaper, along with the laundry room and guest bathroom). We also replaced our kitchen table.

Soon I will undertake a major project... I feel it coming. Hopefully I can convince James to help me pull up our downstairs carpet and replace it with parquet flooring that will match our hallway. Muwahaha!