Making it Worse
So, along with the living room, we are also painting the entry and the stairwell. This afternoon, we decide to get going and start.
The first thing we had to do was fix the huge cracks, divots, and imperfections of the walls. Well, we made it worse than it was:
We never should have started scraping. There was paint and wallpaper and paint and wallpaper. Actually, some of the wallpaper was very cool, and I like the color of this paint.
Anyway, this took us about an hour. The walls are totally whack. There are many significant cracks. There is one area where the whole wall bows in. Above the stairs there is an area that has cracks is a square. I started picking at it:
That's CARDBOARD!!! Thick cardboard. WTF?!?!?!? Seriously.Anyway, we patched what we could and have decided to go with a textured paint. I'm not a fan of textured walls, but we don't have the money to fix the ones we have, so it is the best solution we've got.
posted by Kassie @ 3/17/2007
5 Comments:
perhaps finding underlying cracks and imperfections may have been avoided by removing anything lying proud of the surface then covering all with plain wallpaper as a clean base to paint.
However like many jobs there is a quick way and a hard way. Take re-tiling. We had a bathroom which had been tiled over the original tiles. As it was already done when we bought it I wouldnt strip them off to gain 7mm of room space. Having spent ages stripping of bits of tiles in another property before I could re-fill the wall around the plumbers new pipes. Now I understand there is a time and place to strip back before your make a new surface.
Rule Number One of Old House Stuff: You ALWAYS make it worse before it can get better!
Don't be discouraged. You are doing it the right way, as opposed to the quick way. If you take your time and have patience, the end result will be good for another 50-100 years, just think of it like that :)
I feel your pain. Half of my bathroom was walled in an odd sort of paper-board. (A BATHROOM, of all places!)
I have also brought entire walls down from the humble beginnings of picking at a bad spot... usually it's because I discover crumbling plaster behind wallpaper or wallboard. Ugh!
Stumbled on your blogs, as a fellow Mpls. old-house dweller I find them to be fascinating.
Encountered a problem trying to extend that fascination. The links for your archived blogs start thus:
http://www.oldminneapolishouse.com/rchives/
They only seem to work if "rchives" is re-spelled as "archives".
Belated congrats on the wedding!
Thanks for the heads-up, anonymous! The archives should work now...
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