Wallpaper is in again. It is hard to believe that we have reinvented the decorating wheel again and gone back to the dreaded glue covered paper. I remember my parents taking layers and layers and layers off of the walls in our rental apartment to finally figure out that there may be more ugly papers below the 6 they already peeled (let me rephrase that...) scraped off in tiny little pieces. When that phase of the demolition was completed a new "more beautiful then but now is ugly" wallpaper is put up to cover up the mess that still lies underneath. I remember gazing over book after book to find just the right one that suited my colour scheme I had in mind and my parents were always great about letting me pick what I wanted. Side Note...( I am not that generous with what I let the kids pick and they are bitter about it but that is another blog...)
So the cycle goes...wallpaper is only beautiful to the eye of the beholder and usually comes down when the new tenant comes in. That is what we did with our house. The wallpaper came down, managed to get it down to the bear wall with much blood sweat and tears...and probably a few words said under my breath but they were only kind and loving... There was one final frontier that had the wallpaper that we hadn't removed...A couple of years ago we thought we had found our dream house ( again) and our bathroom hadn't been renovated for probably 25 years and the wallpaper was coming off but not in a good way. The top layer was peeling off and the bottom layer stayed on. We tried everything under the sun to get it off and in a panic of not knowing what to do about it and we needed to get the bathroom show ready..( which didn't really make any difference because we had linoleum on our floor that was duct taped ) I PAINTED OVER THE WALLPAPER.. I will say it quieter. i painted over the wallpaper...if I could make it smaller I would. Big mistake which now leads us to our wallpaper issue at hand. I will not go into the conversations that we have had over that brain lapse but I will say that I have learned my lesson. Never again. But the paper issues still haunt us. We recently completed a bathroom renovation ( which is another blog) and all is new except the walls that were painted over. After an extra 1800 dollar extra plumbing bill our pocketbook and our emotional health couldn't handle another tear apart. So we had lovely wainscoting installed around the perimeter of the room and the plan was to put paintable wallpaper above the wainscoting. The plan was seamless...no pun intended. The wallpaper was installed and was allowed to set before we started painting. There were a few places that needed to be touched up with glue where the corners had peeled up...fixed it no problem. We picked a gorgeous paint colour from benjamin moore..Agean blue. Jason wanted a blue bathroom and so I colour matched from my new shower curtain....Today was the day we were going to get the paint on, hang the mirror, the new hotel style towel bars..the photos of the kids when they were little in the tub..It was going to be done. As soon as Jason put the paint on the paper it started lift up... not just a little bit. The whole sheet of paper. He tried another...and the same thing. All of our plans for a finished room went up in a poof of smoke. We now we be using the steamer to get the rest off of the wall that hasn't already pulled up and I will be looking at my walls that are underneath that will remind me of the huge mistake I made painting over them which will also cause my husband to say "I told you so" again. I can handle the "I told you so"...I hear it quite a bit. I tend to do things my own way and then I am trying to fix something that would and could have been fixed if I had taken the time to do it right in the first place. Kents was very easy to deal with and replaced the paper for us that it turns out only had a smattering of glue on it. She kindly said she was sorry. That was all she could do. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a return policy for wallpaper that included reinstalling when it was defective? Onward and Upward. Back to the drawing board for us. There is an author that imagines that Hell may be what you have created for yourself....If that was the case this would be mine.
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