nevermind, we can't move until we finish the walls after all

Our house is currently habitable if you're cool with showering in the basement under MIL's side but the wiring is vintage 1950, only the kitchen outlets are grounded, and the main living areas contain only 2 outlets each. The electrician needs to do it all over again, but the catch is that the wiring, while exposed on the walls, is under 2 layers of wallpaper and a layer of paint, so we have to strip it so that he can pull it down, then we have to paint the walls, then he has to put the new wiring up. Sooooooo the electricity can't go back up on our side until we've finished stripping the wallpaper and painting (the base colors, but not the decorative wash effects and mural panels I'm planning) in at least 3/4 main rooms.

I was raised by an extremely handy and home-renovating-smart artist mother who has since worked off part of the renovation costs in my parents' house by working with their contractor in the summer, and I know all about painting but I've never dealt with wallpaper: I learned to loathe wallpaper at her knee and was raised on horror stories of her childhood in the 1960s, during which she and her siblings were repeatedly used as forced labor to remodel run-down houses that their dad intended to sell.

But today was the first time I ever tried to remove wallpaper myself.

Dining room wallpaper removal, Day 1

• I didn't realize there are 2 kinds of wallpaper glue, and the kind that was left in the basement was the kind you DON'T use to take old wallpaper down, but the hardware stores were all closed today for Midsummer



• We removed the baseboards, and found them already numbered consecutively by the last person who did the same. I marked where they go on the floorplan. Wax tapped the nails back out because I'm the kind of person who would destroy the nail AND the board and hurt myself while trying to do that. By the way, the baseboards were sloppily stained only on the front and don't match the parquet.



• We didn't remove the rest of the trim, because a previous bad wallpaper-hanger also didn't, and instead glued the edges of the paper onto the window and doorframes (which aren't all the same color, by the way. There's a white frame with a gray door in it and the other door and frame are both gray, but the window trim contains 2 shades of white and the plaster wall of the chimney is a third white and the ceiling is a fourth)



• The ugly beige-mauve-brown wallpaper is hung over what looked like a white painted wall, but turned out to be actually a thick layer of another ugly beigey-pinky wallpaper that had been painted white (a nice shiny, waterproof white that the water didn't really dissolve when it dissolved the top layer). This second beigeypinky paper was ALSO glued over the window and door trim! And was pushed into the corners and crevices around the metal electrical wiring channels very badly. It was also continued up onto the crown molding, which was then painted white on top of this paper (the top layer of wallpaper stops a good 2 cm below the bottom edge of the crown molding). The final (or rather first) layer of paper, a blueygreeny grey color printed with abstract scribbly trees, was actually applied under all the trim, which was originally painted a dark gray-green. So fingers crossed, but after we get the top layers off we may still have to remove the rest of the trim to remove all the paper.



• All in all, sponging on dishsoap and water did work pretty okay for removing the top layer and that wasn't quite as difficult as I anticipated, but I still completely see why people hate it. And we were at it for what felt like a full day of work (really probably less than 5 hours? I think?) and didn't even come that close to finishing one wall. One of the short ones, less than 3 m.