Labor Day, Literally

One of the downsides of renovating a house is that you always think you should be working on a project. When you get four days off for a holiday weekend, instead of looking forward to cookouts and inappropriate drinking, you start contemplating all the tasks you'd like to complete by weekend's end.

You've previously complained so much about all the crap you have to get done that no one dares interrupt your forward movement with a party invitation (at least that's the way we're interpreting no invitations). And since you have so many projects uncompleted or not even started, you don't have the self-esteem to invite anyone over.

So that's where we found ourselves last Friday. So I decided to attack a project I've been wanting to get started forever: removing the wallpaper from the foyer. Based on our experience in the master bedroom, I was expecting to be done steaming all the paper from the walls within a couple of hours.

Ha! How long is it going to take me to learn that nothing is easy in this house?? First, I learned that no two wallpapers are alike. They're more like snowflakes -- really ugly, adhesive-backed, sticky snowflakes -- but each an individual.

The wall coverings in the dining room, laundry, bedroom and foyer have been VERY different. So using a removal technique from a previous room is like using last night's meatloaf recipe to make tonight's cheesecake.

But not knowing this, I proceeded removing the paper the same way we had in the bedroom. The plan was to quickly steam the top paper; then I'd apply more heat to the adhesive below. But after trying this technique on one wall, I realized that the big chunks of drywall being ripped off the walls was due to too much moisture from all that steam.

Even though I changed my game plan for the remaining walls (I started pulling off the top layer with brute force and used the steam just for the adhesive), pieces of those walls still chipped off.

So a project that was supposed to cost me a couple of hours cost me the whole weekend and is spilling over into this week. When I went to add a thin layer of drywall compound to the walls (my favorite, skim coating), the parts where the drywall had been pulled off down to the cardboard were bubbling up like champagne at a wedding toast.

Luckily, after the compound dried, Mr. Hubby was able to use his muscle to sand those parts down. But even after those repairs, I have four walls that have to be skim coated. I'm going to try and do one each day. That way, MAYBE, we can paint this weekend -- IF the drywall compound saves our walls from looking like a pockmarked teenager who has never had the benefit of Proactive.

The good news is that we only have one more room of wallpaper on the main floor! The bad news is that I'm too scared to remove it ...

Have you ever seen what's behind the top layer of drywall??

Tiny bubbles in the wall ...

Just call me "Skim Coat" LevelHead ...