Home Project 2: Interior Paint

After closing on our new house, we still had a month left on our apartment lease, so we started our move slowly. Since we were doing the move ourselves, I was very happy that we were able to take our time, bringing a carload of stuff whenever we visited the house. I'm a veteran of the "move every piece of crap you own in a weekend" move, and the "I have one-month let's take this slow" move is much preferable.

My wife and I decided the first (and easiest) thing we wanted to do was to slap a new coat of paint on the dining room and living room before we moved in all our furniture. Easy? I thought.

The house has sort of an open concept thing going on, so the dining room and living room are basically one large room that runs the length of the house. The previous owner decided that it would be a good idea to separate the rooms with wooden runners on the floor and walls, as well as putting paint in the dining room and wallpaper in the living room.

Here is a photo of the dining room (notice the wooden separators in the photo and the living room wallpaper on the left side of the photo). I don't think the separation thing was quite working out.



Before we could paint, step one was to remove the wallpaper in the living room. Instead of renting a steamer (which at the time seemed like a hassle), we had heard through the magic of HGTV about this amazing new product that when sprayed on the walls would remove wallpaper as good, if not better, than a steamer. We went to Home Depot and bought two large bottles of DIF, which contains a chemical which is suppose to break down the glue in wallpaper, thereby making it easy to remove.

In my humble experience, DIF must be mistaken. After scoring the wall, spraying it down with DIF and waiting the recommended amount of time, it was a little surprising to see that the wallpaper DID NOT COME OFF AT ALL. Nada. Nothing. It turned out to be slightly easier and a lot less messy to rip the wallpaper off piece by piece after first wetting it down with hot water. As the hours dragged by, we ripped small, waterlogged pieces of wallpaper off the wall which we had soaked with hot water. It was more sculpting than home improvement.

As day 1 of our wallpaper removal ended, we managed to clear one wall of the living room:



The rest of the wallpaper took as long to remove as the first wall (thanks DIF) which meant it took us three nights of work to fully remove the wallpaper. While that was going on, my wife and I had decided that we wanted to paint both rooms a single color and we wanted that color to be some sort of yellow. The first paint we bought turned out to be too light (although it looked great on a swatch). We didn't want the inside of our house to look like a baby's room, so we got the paint dyed a deeper yellow.

A work in progress



As you can see, a deeper yellow really meant a brighter yellow. A punch you in the face, burn your retinas yellow. We kept it though, probably because we had been to Jamaica the year prior and the color reminded us of the Caribbean. The yellow has since faded a little, but it does look crazy bright in that picture.

A mere week after starting (3 days of wallpaper removal, 2 days of painting), we were finished.



Lessons learned:

1. Don’t use DIF.
2. Hot water doesn't really work either
3. Wallpaper is the devil’s work.
4. Swatches are misleading