The Living Room: Razing the Roof
Home Rooms:Living Room Jobs: Paint
Note to homeowners: Never, ever, under any circumstances, paint on top of wallpaper. As a favor to future homeowners, in the spirit of neighborliness, scrape off the old wallpaper before painting. The reason for this plea is that the previous owners of our old house did not follow this advice. If you think wallpaper is a pain to remove, trust me, it's nothing compared to removing wallpaper with layers upon layers of paint on top of it. This job was nearly impossible!
After nearly a hundred years, the ceiling in our old house's living room was coming apart. Large cracks had formed on the surface and other patches were peeling away. It was just plain ugly and dirty. We decided to go back to the basics, that is, scrape off all the old paint and wallpaper down to the original finish layer of plaster, and then prime and paint the ceiling...
Easier said than done!
What We Did: Paint Prep
- Before we tackled the ceiling, we emptied the room and covered the floor with plastic.
- Scored the ceiling with a tool that had rotating bits with sharp teeth so that our wallpaper-removing solution could penetrate deeper.
- Sprayed the ceiling with the solution and let it soak. This was pretty messy, as the solution was thin and we were trying to saturate the ceiling. It dripped all over the place.
- Took a razor edged tool and scraped the surface. This is what Wayne is doing in the picture above. As you can see, flakes fly all over the place.
- Unfortunately, we often had to repeat the previous two steps, as once was never enough to get a hundred years of gunk off! Fortunately, this also gave us time to rest. Doing all this above your head left our arms and necks tired and all wet.
- Next, we scrubbed the surface with a stiff brush and warm water, since scraping inevitably left some residue of paper or glue.
- Rinsed the surface, as scrubbing left an ugly dirty layer. This we did with buckets of hot water and a sponge.
And this was all in preparation for the actual painting.
I never realized that for good quality paint jobs, the majority of the work is in preparing the surface. After taking down the old materials from the ceiling, we patched any remaining cracks, and then finally we could prime and paint the ceiling.
All in all, it took about a month to finish. But boy, does it look pretty now! This picture doesn't quite show it, but having a picture of a flat, unpeeling expanse of ceiling just looks like nothing!
