cimorene

So because yesterday, Thursday, was Tenant's moving day (or rather her moving truck day, when Men used their muscles to move her furniture and stacks of heavy boxes), it was pressingly necessary to get the walls fixed (and painted) in the two remaining rooms on her side of the house, which meant that I spent Tuesday priming the hallway - it pretty much took the whole day. Wax did a lot of things Tuesday too - moving furniture and heavy items out of Tenant's side and cleaning - but I had to focus on the painting or I wouldn't've finished. I made sure to stop and eat, and we had to break to go to the store for more paint, but otherwise it consumed the day and left me physically exhausted. Priming was the more demanding aspect of the paint job because the hallway had been wallpapered.

See, , wallpaper sucks compared with paint in general, at least in many people's minds (and particularly mine), because wallpaper is MUCH harder to cover or undo. Wallpaper that has been ruined or damaged often has color or texture problems that would show through a new layer, and old wallpaper is incredibly labor-intensive to remove, yet to fix a wall there's often no choice but removal.

In contrast, a bad paint job can always be sanded and spackled smooth, then primed. It might take a lot of sanding, but if you have a power sander, it's never actually difficult. Old wallpaper may frustrate all of the first 5-6 methods you attempt to use to get it off the wall.

I was raised knowing this about wallpaper because my mother was raised by a serial renovator who used his small children as forced labor for fixing up houses to (ideally) sell at a profit, and she was traumatized by childhood wallpaper removal experiences which formed very colorful and dramatic stories for me when I was a little kid. I'd never removed or hung wallpaper myself, but had extensive room-painting experience (trim painting, paneling painting, furniture painting, object painting... my mom's a superhuman artist DIYer who redid just about everything in my childhood home, and I was allowed and taught to help, not pressed into service). But wallpaper came up in our house restoration because it's not only standard for the period (1950) and hence "appropriate", but generally the more care-friendly and easily-obtained of the very few breathable wall covering options available to the restorer (and our type of house, frtdneatj, requires that the walls be made and covered exclusively in breathable materials in order to prevent water damage). And IN ADDITION TO THIS, IT'S EASIER. (The exact opposite of the usual relationship between wallpaper and paint.)

The thing is, nobody tells you this! Oh sure, wallpaper is recommended left and right, but generally like this: "It's more appropriate" and "It's not THAT bad". This is a bad description of the state of affairs! If you've got a wallpapered wall and you need to refinish it, wallpapering it again is going to be easier than painting it 90+% of the time. So, yeah, 'it's not THAT bad' might be accurate: wallpaper hanging is fiddly and can be difficult but it's possible to get the hang of it. But that makes it sound like paint is still easier, which isn't true! Only the actual paint application is easier. If you've got a wallpapered wall, getting it from wallpaper to paint is MUCH HARDER than replacing it with more wallpaper.

Even if you remove every scrap of paper, you'll need a layer of new plain paper to make a smooth and even surface for the paint, unless you have undamaged smooth wallboard or plaster wall underneath it (unlikely in any old house and a 0% chance in our 1950 Finnish wood house), so there will still be visible paper seams from that. And in the least-work-for-you case, a recent vinyl wallpaper that splits as designed, leaving its back half on the wall with an even newsprint color behind, these seams are still visible, plus any previous holes or dings in the wall, spackled and patched or not. The only way to avoid this would be a fresh skim coat of plaster, which, needless to say, is even harder to successfully apply (we didn't bother, so our painted walls have seams and bumps from old patches and so on visible through the paint).

It's likely that you'll need to remove damaged paper if it's more than a couple of decades old (we had to remove all the paper that contained plastic regardless of its condition) and it probably won't come nicely - it might need to be scratched with a knife, pierced with a spike roller to let the water through, spritzed or sponged to soak it with water or soap, bodily scraped off with a paint scraper for nearly every inch... the only method we haven't been forced to yet is steaming.

But in contrast, to repaper, if the paper isn't plastic, even if it's somewhat stained or damaged in spots, then you likely don't need to remove it to hang new wallpaper over it; and if it's a recent paper the top layer is likely, as mentioned, to simply split off easily. You can usually hang new wallpaper directly over old, perhaps after a bit of sanding to rough it up, sometimes over a primer coat if the old paper had a bold pattern to prevent color showing through. With peeling or damaged paper, you can usually hang a plain base paper in between and then hang the new paper, which is still much less work than all the scraping and removal of painting and will still produce a nicer result.

And if you don't like wallpaper patterns, you can buy solid colored wallpaper! When I originally saw solid-colored wallpaper I was baffled and bemused. I even scoffed. The pricing made it more expensive than the paint I was used to for the same result, with less color choices, and everyone knows wallpaper hanging is fiddly and difficult! But I'm used to no-brand latex; if you're comparing the price of brand names, natural, low-VOC or no-VOC paint (which you should regardless of your views on plastic), the prices are competitive or in wallpaper's favor. Even natural paper wallpaper would be cheaper for the same area - and if the substrate is wallpaper, would be way easier. I could've got paper wallpaper in nearly the same color as our livingroom paint for under 30€ per roll (7 rolls... ish) and put it up after half the wallpaper stripping we did in here for a result that wouldn't have been scratched and dinged when the electrician bumped it after less than a week and would've taken about a quarter the time to put up as the FOUR coats of Uula's no-VOC linseed-containing water-based satin paint. Two cans of that are over 100€, and the primer is the same again. If you're lucky enough not to need primer, the paint would be cheaper, but it would still take four times as long and give you a less durable, less good-looking finish.

ANYWAY... the point was... I had a wallpapered hallway and I wanted to paint it, and that made it more work. (I could've saved time and money with paper instead, but I didn't know what I know now early enough to order paper for it instead.) There was a day of stripping the vinyl-topped paper, which didn't split nicely, with a scraper, then a day of sanding all the places where the paper was torn or ripped in the process plus all the holes in the wall in a dust mask and goggles, then a day of dusting, sweeping, and washing the walls to remove the dust, then spackling all the holes and a day for the spackle to dry, then a day of power sanding all the spackle, then ANOTHER day of dusting and washing the walls. And this was all before the primer. As mentioned previously, the addition has mid century frameless doors, so each of the 6 doors had the thickness of the wallboard - a half centimeter - surrounding the doorjambs, and those half-centimeter faces around each door opening had to be primed with a brush and then the jamb wiped clean with a rag.

And that was Tuesday.

Wednesday was spent painting. I mixed a small amount of leftover green into the new white paint to get a pale green for the hall, then painted the walls with a large brush in X strokes with a wet brush to create visible brush strokes and color variation to help cover the unevenness of the wall. When that was finished, I mixed a bit of powdered umber pigment into the glaringly white lime-based paint for the bedroom (that room has one of those mystery smells that sticks after cleaning, very faint and a bit plasticky, so we used some air-cleaning lime paint) and painted it in X strokes as well, simply because lime paint is extremely prone to showing visible brush strokes and if they're crisscrossing they look deliberate. I finished that close to midnight. No time remained for a second coat, which would have produced full coverage and less color variation - from a more even coating of mineral particles - but at least with the X strokes it looks fine. The bedroom color is a warm off-white with a mauve-rose undertone; the hallway is a cool minty green.

Thursday was Tenant's moving truck day, so I got up early to carry three laundry racks, two bins full of tools, and some assorted stuff out of the other side to make way for the movers. (After sleeping too little and Snookums waking me up 6 times for some reason.) I left the bathroom stuff and some assorted stuff in the kitchen (we've moved most of our kitchen stuff out, minus a side table with the kettle and a few bins).

Wax called the master plumber again since no plumbers showed up Wednesday or Thursday morning and he said oh, the plumber who did our bathroom was SICK, so he would have to come himself. Monday. :|

The movers came, and they moved a bunch of stuff in. I had to rush back over there to pull stuff out of the way and construct an impromptu barrier to keep the cats on our side (there's no door between our side and Tenant's kitchen, of course) while letting movers into the kitchen in case they needed to put stuff there, but they didn't really... probably because the kitchen's so small there's no room left with our table and recycling bins still in it. Her deep freeze is still in the hallway.

Wax came down for her afternoon break yesterday and found me huddled on the sofa, listening to the movers move and having a meltdown, and told me if I was falling over to just nap upstairs. I went upstairs and fell asleep for several hours, but in spite of that, I slept over 12 hours last night (minus the four times Snookums woke me to feed him of course). Still woke up with a headache, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it was last night.

Tenant spent the night at a friend's. She said she's gonna try to move her peonies and get them in the ground in our yard Monday morning; I thought she meant to come back here this morning but she hasn't, which is just as well because I'm consumed with guilt about us still using her kitchen and bathroom. I think this isn't WHOLLY due to our using her plumbing though - she has so much stuff that you can't actually use any of the rooms but the bedroom, and she couldn't even find her light fixtures or linens.