About a month after my husband and I had moved into our first home, one Saturday we woke up and decided “let’s paint our kitchen today!”
Originally, the plan was to just paint over what was currently covering our walls. (dark blue paint)
We knew that there was wallpaper buried underneath a few layers of paint from previous owners, but it didn’t look bad so we figured we could just paint over top of it like they had. Well, as we were taping up the kitchen in preparation for painting, it turned out that some of the wallpaper behind the stove was peeling off – surprisingly easily. Curiosity got the best of me and I began to peel, and peel some more, and peel some more… before long, we had peeled the wallpaper off of about half the kitchen, and discovered that there was one very thin layer left behind on top of the drywall (there were no less than 3 layers of wallpaper on our walls to begin with, maybe even more). Crap.
We googled a bit and figured that the best solution for us would be to use a vinegar and water solution, spray it on the walls, and use a spackle scraper to help us peel off the remaining layer of wallpaper. This was much easier said than done, and the process of removing the remaining wallpaper took us well over a week of spraying and scraping what we could when we got home from work in the evenings.
Needless to say, it was not a fun job, and looking back on it, we’d have probably been better off knocking out the drywall and installing new, because the amount of putty we had to use to patch the dents we made in the wall with the scraper was astronomical. A lot of this was due to our frustration and desire to “just get the wallpaper off!”, but some mishaps were inevitable and we’d have probably saved a lot of time in the long run if we’d started with a clean slate.
After we’d finally gotten all of the wallpaper off and gently washed the walls with a dawn/water mix to remove all of the glue from the wallpaper, we were finally ready to spackle, sand, tape, and prime our walls for our new color. We had the same color in our kitchen in our old rental home and loved it so much that we wanted to use it again in our new one. For anyone interested, it’s “Dry Earth” by Valspar.
Ah… doesn’t it feel so much better already? To me a kitchen should be airy and open-feeling, and changing from a dark blue to a light beige-green makes the kitchen so much more inviting and pleasant to be in!
What do you think?
Stay tuned for yet another DIY kitchen project that we just finished tackling – the last major kitchen project until we replace the countertops and add a backsplash next year. Hint: starts with “new” and rhymes with “babinet boors” :)
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