How to destroy a perfectly good bedroom

I decided that the guest room needed to be the first major project that I would attack. Doug contends that getting the air conditioning hooked up was a major project and I agree but I really didn't have anything to do with that so my first major project is the guest room. It has plaster walls which had at least 4 layers of wallpaper and a couple layers of paint. The room started out like this, a perfectly nice room if you didn't look at the walls too closely. Every seam and crack in the wallpaper were obvious if you looked closely.


The wallpaper was really dry and the majority of the actual paper came off in large pieces without having to apply any kind of moisture or solution to it. It went really well for a while. When we got to the bottom layer, something else appeared. I still don't know what it is. It was a thick red stuff on about 3/4 of the wall surface that had to be washed off with water. There was some brown stuff that had to be washed off but nothing like this thick red stuff. I'm assuming it was a combination of the wallpaper paste and the backing of the first wallpaper that had been on for 100 years. It was probably, literally, 8 hours worth of work to get this red stuff off.




After cleaning that red stuff off the walls for what seemed like forever, I started patching the millions of nail holes with lightweight spackling. That worked well for the regular nail holes. There were a couple of good size cracks that Doug decided to patch with actually patching plaster. As he worked on this, he came to a realization that he would rather just put a skimcoat over the entire surface of the walls. He decided that since we had put so much time into these walls, he wants them to look really good so he used what he had on hand last night and will finish up tonight after buying some more. Then we can prime and paint. These walls should look good. Pictures of the starting-to-be patched walls in the next post.