Square Peg

I’m at the stage where you have to keep going with each job regardless otherwise it just feels like it’s going nowhere. I had a useful discussion with a joiner this week which suggests my plan for the kitchen should work (more on that in future).

Upstairs, the kid’s room is just about free of wallpaper. I’ve come across a couple of tricky areas, specifically in the chipboard at the windows and on the ceiling. The latter is woodchip which is renowned for being impossible to remove. In this room, the ceiling paper definitely has to come off as it’s been badly patched in the past and looks rubbish. The good news is that the woodchip itself isn’t any more difficult to remove than the rest of the paper – it tends to come off in nice sheets. The difficulty is in using the steamer upside down. In addition to the steam there’s a lot of condensation build up in the plate which needs to be emptied frequently plus there’s quite a bit of sputtering and splashing of hot water which makes using it slow and hard going.

This looks like some kind of explosion has occurred but it’s just condensation.

Downstairs things are going more rapidly. I’ve managed to remove the wallpaper from all the walls right up to the glass door.

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Unfortunately this revealed a couple of issues. First, in the kitchen area, the paper had been applied on top of a layer of what looks like skimmed surface plaster or paint. A section of this fell off (first pic at ceiling of kitchen) as I removed paper no doubt due to it’s age and the fact that the walls are quite uneven. I didn’t fancy removing the rest until further discussion with professionals. The whole lot may have to come off and I can imagine this will have to be skimmed or faced with something. The second issue was in the ceiling just above. I’ve been trying to avoid taking off the paper there in the hope I might get away with just painting it, however the area above the bare plaster pulled away by itself revealing multiple layers of paint, paper and other materials. I can’t see this being a stable surface to leave in place so I guess it’ll have to come down too.

For a change of pace I returned to demolishing the wooden shelves in the corner of the living room. As I’ve said before about the built-in elements in the house, they aren’t especially pretty but they were built to last. My previous attempt at this (with screwdrivers and a heavy masonry hammer) only resulted resulted in some barely loosened supports. I had a go at splitting the shelves and supports with the jigsaw, which worked very well and allowed me to batter the sliced pieces to bits with the big hammer. Very satisfying.