The Walls In The Entry After Removing the Wallpaper – One Room Challenge Week 2

Removing old wallpaper, or in our case vinyl wallcoverings in the entryway, is like revealing the history of the house.  You never know what you are going to discover underneath the layers of paper and sticky residue.  For week 2 of the One Room Challenge™, we tackled the tedious task of removing the wallpaper and prepping the walls for paint.

Welcome to Week 2 of the One Room Challenge.

If you have ever removed wallpaper before, you just know.

You know that it can sometimes be so easy that it fools you to try it again.  The next room not so much.  There is glue residue, little itty bitty pieces of the paper that you can only seem to remove with tiny tweezers or your fingernails, and then there are the holes and uneven sections of the wallboards to repair.

Here is the before photo as a reminder of how the room looked.

This post is not a tutorial on how to remove wallpaper or vinyl wallcoverings.  But is just a step in our process to update the entryway in our home.

This time around, my husband used a heat gun to loosen up the glue on the vinyl wallcovering in our entry.  I was out of town that weekend and didn’t realize he was going to jump right in to the project.  Thankfully after so many years of blogging he knows to take lots of pictures.

As you can see in this picture he did have some help that weekend but it just wasn’t from me.

For the most part, the heat gun worked wonders on getting the vinyl wallcoverings off the wall.

What he uncovered was that the vinyl wallcovering was not the first time the entryway had had wallpaper.  Underneath the wall vinyl, was evidence of previous wallpaper that someone had removed, not very neatly and cleanly either, and had just installed the vinyl over the existing damage.

The walls had a lot of damage and uneven areas and missing sections of drywall boards underneath the trim.

By the time I got home from visiting my mom, he had already applied the first layer of skim coating to the damaged walls.  And had sanded it down.  I got the joy of cleaning up the settling dust for days but I won’t complain about missing the hard part.

During that same time he finished the work on the ceiling as well. 

I had previously removed the popcorn ceiling a couple of years ago but we delayed the whole project.  He actually found that the ceiling was in better condition even after removing the popcorn texture than the walls were.

He had removed the old light fixture, skim coated the ceiling and got it completely prepped and a primer coat applied.

My husband, bless his heart, is a bit of an OCD perfectionist when it comes to the details of a wall, both in repairs and paint. 

Maybe it comes from his military background or his attention to detail during surgery, but he will continue to work on a damaged area of a wall again and again until it meets his standards.

Not a bad thing since wall prep is the most important part of any paint job.

I just mention it because he spent about 10 days going back and forth between applying a skim coat wall compound paste to repair the walls and sanding it down and then cleaning the wall in different areas.  All around his busy work schedule.  Just when he thought he was done, the first coat of primer revealed even more uneven places, so he worked on it some more.

I don’t have pictures of all of the work but you get the idea.  There was a lot of construction dust in my house for a few weeks.

So at the end of week two of the One Room Challenge, we have much smoother walls ready for paint.  We will be installing the rustic boards for the accent wall next.

Be sure to come back next week.

Hugs,