Also known as: I have no idea how this happened.
When Nate and I bought our current house we knew from the moment we stepped into it during the original home tour that this house would need some significant updates to bring it into the current decade. While the bones were good the cosmetics were terribly out of date. And some things were broken. The one that bugged Nate the most was the faucet in the main floor's/guest's bathroom. No water came out when the hot water handle was turned, the cold water handle wouldn't shut off all the way so water dripped slowly, but constantly, out of the faucet, and water occasionally dripped below the sink. When we first moved in Nate wanted to jump on fixing the faucet, but I couldn't decide what fixtures I wanted. There was enough back and forth that eventually this item fell off the "to do" list as more pressing matters caught our attention outside (i.e., the large quantity of wasps and hornets that surrounded our house during the summer months - Beth being stung twice in a week as she accidentally stepped on two wasps that were walking along our grass - yes, there were so many wasps that seeing them hanging around in the grass was not unusual). But the faucet was always in the back of our minds.
On our drive home from Portland after Christmas we decided it was time to go forth with more of our indoor updates and first on the list was fixing the faucet that never seemed to get fixed. I'd previously picked out the faucet that I'd wanted so it was a quick trip to Home Depot to grab the needed box. Note: for all those interested (Hi, Mom!) "we" decided on the Moen Banbury in Brushed Nickel finish. While there I noticed that they had wallpaper steamer kits available and decided to pick one up. There is a LOT of wallpaper in our house and we want it gone. But how to remove it? We'd heard both good and bad about painting straight over wallpaper, even if a layer of texture is between the wallpaper and paint as we would need. So we thought we'd spend a little bit of money to see how complicated it was to remove wallpaper to decide if we needed a professional to do it or if we could do it ourselves. I figured this kit would stay in a closet for a while. Boy, was I wrong!
Saturday afternoon/evening saw Nate changing out our sink faucets for our new, updated version. So pretty! We went to bed pretty happy with the small update we'd accomplished.
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| BEFORE: Old, gold, crusted with yuck. |
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| Closer view of my not pretty sink. |
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| AFTER: My new, pretty sink. No crusties in sight! |
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| It doesn't scream 1993 and I love it! |
Then Sunday morning rolled around. As we all slept in until 9am (lots of exercise and two middle of the night wake-ups will do that I suppose) we were having a lazy morning until Nate, bless his heart, decided to open up the wallpaper steamer kit box to see what was inside. Well, you can't hand an engineer an unknown tool without them trying it out. So a few minutes later Nate wanted to see how well the steamer worked on our wallpaper, figuring that we might luck out and get a chunk of one wall done in a few hours. Instead, it was easy. So easy! When I walked into the bathroom ten or so minutes later half of a wall was gone. Of course I had to try it. And then, I just don't know what happened. We kept going and going and suddenly we looked back and our quick little "let's see how this tool works" turned into our main floor bathroom being half-way demolished.
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| A view of the toilet area with it's amazing wallpaper. The first of four different designs of wallpaper in my home. |
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| Don't forget that amazing border! |
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| Another view. |
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| Other side of the bathroom. |
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| It's a work of art. Multiple mirrors curved to give you all the angles. And those light sconces? Be still my fluttering heart. |
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| Here's a second view to see the mirror in all its glory. |
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| Nate tries out the wallpaper steamer. |
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| Our first wallpaper rip! |
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| I had to note how well the wallpaper was installed. All the light-switch covers are also covered in wallpaper that match EXACTLY the design of the wallpaper they are on top of. |
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| The wallpaper is coming down so easily! |
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| Look at it all go! |
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| One wall is now wallpaper free. |
And here's where we lost our minds. I mentioned to Nate that the wallpaper strip I was working on went behind the mirror. Nate looked at me. I looked at Nate. And then he grabbed a crow bar and the next thing we know we're half-way into a bathroom remodel instead of just replacing a sink's faucets and seeing if a small square of wallpaper will come down.
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| Two things here: 1) Note how the wallpaper border has been cut out on its bottom edge so that the flowers and leaves seem to freely curve downward to the lights so there's no harsh seam to see. 2: WE TORE DOWN THE MIRRORS! Thankfully, we found that behind the mirrors was a false-front curve hiding the actual 90 degree angle, which is what we wanted for this area. |
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| Nate removing the second set of curved mirror pieces. |
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| And here we have our final product. Both curved mirror pieces are gone, faux wall removed, and only one wall of wallpaper left. |
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| New view of toilet side of the bathroom. |
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| Ceiling and walls without wallpaper. |
We stopped for the evening just shy of removing the last wall of wallpaper as we were exhausted. Basically having worked straight from 10am - 5pm. Oh and we also took down all of our Christmas decorations inside and out to add to the fun of the day. And now we're kind of looking at each other like what the heck did we just do. LOL.
Good news: We discovered that it's pretty easy to remove our wallpaper, just needs some time and attention. We've started on a big remodel which makes me feel like this house is one step closet to becoming my home. (I mean I know it's my home but the decor isn't. And from experience until my stamp is put on the house it's not really mine, mine if that makes sense.) It feels like old, fun times with Nate and I working together on a project.
Bad news: When the bathroom counter was installed it was with the curved mirrors faux-wall already in place, so the side tile pieces were cut in a curve. As we just removed the curved faux-wall we need to either find matching tile to install in place of the curved pieces (highly unlikely) or replace the entire counter top. Financially it would have been better if we'd been able to keep the original counters as I didn't mind them too much. But, now that we know part of it needs to be replaced we're leaning towards replacing it all. $$$
Overall, it was a super fun day working with Nate, removing wallpaper was strangely cathartic, and my old, ugly bathroom is getting a face-lift. Here's to hoping we have it back in some semblance of working order when we have family over to celebrate Beth and Jake's 3rd birthday in just a few weeks!
