The wallpaper has been there since the mid-1990s and it's got to come down before we can paint. I bought some tools and some chemicals and started working.
In two hours I'd chipped off a little area, a couple feet on a side.
Went and got a steamer, and went to work, and removed it from a much larger area...but there's a problem. The place where I steamed is scarred and cratered.
It looks as if that when the wall was papered, it wasn't covered with anything. Drywall went up, it got mudded, and right over the top went wallpaper. That can't be right, though, because according to what I've read about it, putting wallpaper directly on top of drywall and/or joint compound leads to poor adhesion, and this is anything but.
But I was having so much trouble not gouging the wall, nothing else makes sense. I mean, the wallpaper was not coming loose, so it could not have been that wet. I should have been able to scrape it off pretty easily, but it wouldn't go. If it had been properly primed (or "sized", in the parlance of paper-hangers) the glue on the paper should let go pretty easily, and it simply will not let go.
The result is that the part where I used steam to remove wallpaper is totally screwed. I'm going to have to re-mud it at least, and I may end up replacing some of the drywall because it looks as if some of the gouges are into the drywall itself. I just can't tell.
The little 2x2 area that I laboriously chipped away at over the course of two hours is fine; you can even see the plub line drawn by the guy who hung the paper.
So what I'll probably do is have another try at it (tomorrow night) and be a little more sparing with the steam, and see how I do.
Worst case, as I said, I end up hanging a new sheet of drywall or two. Won't enjoy it, but I can do it.
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Fifty years later, the i7-8086. I wonder how many 8086 processors they could fit on that CPU's die? Current intel processors have a feature size some 229 times smaller than they could make 'em in 1978.
Heh.
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Now Philadelphia wants to tax new construction. You see, once you've squeezed all the possible money out of everything else, if you want to go on spending money as only government can you need to find new things to tax.
And to hell with its effects on the economy.
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Best airplane ever. Bar none.
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We're starting to move again on fixing up the house; besides wallpaper removal I need to start getting the living and dining rooms prepped for paint. It's going to be a very busy next couple of weeks....