Our wallpaper victory!

That’s right folks, wallpaper removal has been completed.  It was not pretty, nor was it fast, but it’s over (for now…after our discovery we carefully inspected other rooms of our house.  We have painted wallpaper in 2 other rooms.  GRRR…but they are neither here nor now).

So once we got through all of the trial and error, we finally settled on our winning “painted wallpaper removal” format.

1)  If there is an area of unpainted wallpaper, this is your new best friend.  It’s MUCH easier to get the wallpaper process if you have an edge to get under.  We found unpainted wallpaper behind the toilet, sink, towel bar, toilet paper holder, outlet cover, and light switch cover.  This gave us a start on 3 of the 4 walls.

2)  Once you have a bit of an edge to pull, get the putty knife under there and carefully start to work it loose.  You will not get the glue up in this step and that is okay, your goal should be the paint and actual wallpaper design.  If you do it slowly and patiently, you will be able to get large peels started.  When this happens, you will feel ridiculously victorious…

Once you get the hang of the “large peels” part of the process, you will find that it’s easier to control the “rip” if you periodically take a utility knife and cut down the extra.

3)  After you have peeled off the majority of the painted wallpaper, you are ready to tackle the glue.  The good news is the glue is easier.  Phew.  Take your preferred glue removal method (hot water and Dawn dish soap, fabric softner and water or in our case, DIF concentrate and water) and a sponge and work it into the gluey sections of the wall.  Be sure to start at the top because it will run down.  Once you have wet the glue down, wait about 5 minutes and try it with a putty knife.  If it doesn’t peel away from the wall easily, use the sponge and apply more solution, wait another 5 minutes.

4)  Once you glue has started to loosen, take your putty knife and start to peel the glue up.  We were also able to get the well-soaked glue to peel off in large chunks similar to the wall paper.

You can see up by the ceiling the glue is starting to bubble, that means it’s ready to get off the wall.  Woo hoo!

5) After the majority of the white glue is removed, you will find there were probably some stubborn spots that didn’t pull lose with the solution.  I highly recommend the DIF concentrate for this job.  Since it’s a gel, it stays put where it’s sprayed and makes it easy to remove the stubborn spots without drenching the wall.  Wait 5 minutes and remove with a putty knife.  This part of the process was very sticky, so we had a warm, damp paper towel ready to wipe off our putty knives.

6)  Once all the glue is off, your walls will probably look awful….maybe even something like this.

Never fear…you’re getting somewhere.  So once you have the glue off the wall, you will need to clean your walls one last time.  We used warm water and vinegar to remove the remaining stickiness.

7) With clean walls, you are ready to start the drywall repair process.  I won’t detail that since Steve is in charge of drywall repair, but it’s really not too hard, just time consuming.  Be sure to wear a mask and block off the impacted room from the rest of your house.

We quarantined off the room with a drop cloth and some painters tape.  We also have the shop vac plugged in and ready to go when Steve is done.  It took 3 coats of dry wall mud (and corresponding sanding in between) but our bathroom is mudded, sanded and ready to prime!

Once we got this down, it wasn’t too bad, but it still took us a LOT longer to complete than I would have liked.  This was easier than removing the sheetrock (which is what the internet had led us to believe was the only solution).  We’ll probably end up doing this again to save ourselves some dinero, but I can’t say for sure  If you are looking to tackle such a project, it’s definitely doable, just be sure to give yourself plenty of time to complete your task!

When is a door not a door?

…when it’s ajar!  hahaha

While we’re working on the bathroom, we have some “down time” while we are waiting for things to dry in the bathroom so I decided it was a good time to paint our 1st floor doors white.  Having never painted a door before, I headed to Lowe’s first and purchased a 4″ foam roller and tray.  I had read online that foam rollers were best to not leave streak/roller bumps.  I had a gallon of paint mixed in Behr paint + primer, color matched to Valspar Frost, semi-gloss finish.  We took off all the door knobs and hinges and then set up my door painting line in the basement.

Like the sawhorses?  The process I followed to paint the doors was pretty simple.  Before I started painting, I washed the doors down with warm vinegar water.  Once I was ready to paint, I did the outside area first, then moved to the main panels, did the detail work, and finished up with the small panels.  I used the 4″ foam roller for everything and it worked pretty slick!  I’ve ended up doing 2 coats per side, just to make sure it’s all covered.  The prior owners had small kids, so the bottom of the doors are pretty banged up.  Most of the doors have never been painted but they decided to try to paint the door that goes to the basement using a cream off white.

Here’s a bit of the new paint and the yellowish door…I can’t wait for these guys to dry to I can hang them up and see the 1st floor brighten up.

I have followed the very conservative role of one coat of paint per day.  I want to make sure it can thoroughly dry so they don’t become dinged up when I flip them over.  I am finishing my last coat tonight…more to come on my mini-door project soon!

I love a good bargain…don’t you?

We’ve been searching for a vanity, and we found our inspiration vanity at Lowe’s, but we wanted to see what else might be out there and what we could find that was the right balance between being affordable and being what we would want to look at for the remainder of the time we live in the house.  We went to Menards first and didn’t find much that really fit what we were looking for.  Next up, Home Depot.  We walked through the vanity aisle and weren’t really finding anything that “tripped our trigger” so to speak.  Thinking we missed something, we decided to take one more lap around and came to the very back side of the aisle where we ran face to face into exactly what we were looking for.

Espresso colored wood – check.  Square sink – check.  On Closeout- Check.  Upon closer inspection, we determined that it was originally a $149.00 vanity, marked down to $75.00 because one side was a bit wobbly and in need of some work.  After some debate, I wasn’t really sold on it, I mean $75.00 was a good price, but for as rickety as it was, we felt it should be lower.  We spent about 10 minutes debating who was going to find someone and ask if they could go lower for us.  Yes, that’s right, our firm “we hate negotiation” policy was about to be thrown out the door.  I don’t know if we were feeling particularly bold or what exactly but we decided that if we could get it for $40.00 we’d be good.  Steve lost the, “you do it, no you do it, you do it, no you do it” battle, so off he went to find someone.  We asked and were told that they couldn’t negotiate on the weekends but they would definitely go lower for us if we came back on Monday.

We felt quite victorious as we were leaving, even though we didn’t have it yet, we were proud that we asked.  Steve went back on Monday at lunch and picked it up for $40.00.  The bonus?  It also included the vanity mirror…so a vanity, sink, and mirror for $40.00.  It isn’t open like our “inspiration vanity” but we are still loving it and think it will be perfect for our new and improved bathroom.  Our bathroom budget that we didn’t set is looking mighty good!  We’re out working on it right now (making it more stable and such), but I’ll give you a sneak peek (we set it in our bathroom to make sure it would fit okay).

Bathroom Delight

Steve and I have had a LOT of time to spend together in our 25 square foot expanse while we painstakingly remove the golf tees from our poor house’s walls…to get through the awful and time consuming process that is wallpaper removal, we have been talking and dreaming about our plan for the bathroom (if you remember from here, we didn’t start with much of plan since it was just going to be a simple project).  We started with the vanity since that is my biggest beef with the old bathroom.  Finish scratched round, shallow pedestal sink is not doing it for me.  The vanity needs to be small, since we don’t have a LOT of space that we are working with and we both love the simple lines of a square sink.  During our bargain hunting trip to Lowe’s last weekend (where we scored this rug and the cabinet we were going to use for the vanity but found was too tall), we wandered through the sink aisle and found this beauty.

We love that it has closed cabinets for storage, ya know so we can keep crazy things in the bathroom like spare toilet paper and extra hand towels, but is open on the bottom for a basket or whatever else we might want to put there.  Vanity inspiration — found.

After we settled on a style of vanity, the natural next step was the faucet.  Our existing faucet is not the right size for the sink, so to get water on your hands, you have to basically put your hands on the back of the sink.  The sink is gross to begin with so I’ve been walking to the kitchen sink to wash my hands.  On top of that, the faucet drips (and it has my favorite brass on the handles)

I wish the sink would photograph in it’s “true beauty”, but alas, here, it looks clean.  You’ll have to believe me.   However you can see the trickle of water that comes out of the sink and touches the back.  This photo is from the day we moved in, so it still had the sign on it from the house winterizing.

We are thinking something that arcs out a bit more to keep hands away from the back of the sink but still has clean/modern lines to it…something like this one.

We don’t have to purchase a new toilet, and I already told you about the magical toilet button here, but we did have to get a toilet kit from Menards with a new wax ring and new seals/bolts.  Cheaper than a new toilet and really not too interesting.  I’ll spare you the toilet kit photo since it’s more of a necessity than a “bath vision”.  haha.

With the vanity and faucet squared away, we moved on to color.  I’m thinking either a light green, like this (lemon mint from Olympic):

or a bright fun blue like this one (Sweet Rhapsody by Behr):

I’m leaning towards the blue, but green isn’t off the table…decisions decisions.  We also decided we’re going to do the trim in the same frosty white from Valspar color as the fireplace.  I did go to Home Depot and have them match it because I like using the Behr paint and primer so much more.  We opted to purchase deglosser to do the trim rather than sand it and get a dusty mess.  Don’t worry, once that process starts there will for sure be a post about it’s effectiveness.

We’ll need a new light fixture, I am thinking one with 3 lights for a little better light, I want something more modern (non-brass) and able to accommodate CFL’s.  I’m thinking something like this one from Lowe’s.

As we get further in, we’ll work out the fun accessories, but I thought I’d share our vision as it sits right now!

We’re floored

While we were at Lowe’s this weekend perusing assorted bathroom items, we wandered our way to the rug aisle.  I had vaguely remembered reading this post on Decorchick’s blog.  At the time that I read it, we didn’t really need a rug and I didn’t think much of it….but in the aisle of Lowe’s, it suddenly dawned on me…our kitchen dinette (as Steve calls it) area has a pretty worn wood floor.  Refinishing it is on the agenda someday, but definitely not any time soon.  I decided to take a closer look because $17.00 for a 5×7 rug isn’t too shabby.  I couldn’t make up my mind so I grabbed 2 different designs (the only other design was a mostly brown pattern with a few flowers, it was pretty cool, but I was afraid it was too brown for our wood floor) of rug and anxiously came home to spread them out.

Steve was on team zebra the entire time, but I was thinking the green might be a nice pop of color….well, we laid them on the floor and it became quickly apparent, the zebra print just popped.

I’m loving it (I know the whole thing needs to be centered, but we have a wide walkway going on now to get the ladder and other bathroom fixing essentials through).  I think it adds a little pizzazz to our room and it makes me smile when I see it.

Lucy also loves it, she gave it the Lucy seal of approval.

Now for the details on the rug- it’s a jute rug and is a bit scratchy to walk on, but since it’s under the table, I’m not too worried.  If this was a living room rug that I would always be resting my feet on, I think I would go another way.  I was concerned that it might scratch our floor more, but the back of the rug has a very nice, anti-skid coating on it and the edges are all trimmed with fabric so it seems to be pretty sturdy and soft.  I like the look of the jute, it adds texture to our floor without competing with the carpet in the adjacent room.  $17.00 zebra rug, you are a keeper.

Fore!

So this weekend, we were really excited to be home and get to do something to our house.  We haven’t had a full weekend home, to ourselves, since the weekend before Easter…that’s a long time!  We have a lot of work that needs to be done on the outside of our house, but we woke up Saturday to some rain and storms.  Boo.  We decided we’d paint our trim during the rainy day…so we ran to Lowe’s quick for some supplies.  In the middle of our searching for deglosser, we found ourselves in the bathroom accessories aisle where they had this allen + roth cabinet on sale for $39.00.

We have needed something in our main bathroom for storage so we decided to pick it up and see if it would work.  It was a little too tall for our toilet paper needs, so as I was getting ready to pack it up and take it back, I happened to read this post from Young House Love and got a crazy notion that we could make this be our new bathroom sink.  After much deliberation, we determined the cabinet was also too tall for this task and would be impossible for to comfortably use.  In order to determine that though, we ended up removing the existing sink.

As you can see, we also removed the toilet.  The inspector told us when we bought the house that the seals on the toilets were going bad, so we figured this weekend seemed like a good time to just do a quick bathroom remodel.  Paint the trim, swap out the light fixture and the vanity, seal up the toilet, paint and call it day.  Famous last thoughts/words anyone?

When we removed the toilet, we found something that took this room from simple project to potential nightmare…what you ask?

Golf tee wallpaper UNDER the paint.

After a LOT of internet googling, we weren’t very hopeful on our odds of removing this without needing to put up new sheetrock…which is WAY more than we bargained for with our quick little weekend project.  We decided we didn’t have much to lose, so we headed to Sherwin Williams to see if they had any thoughts on our dilemma.  They suggested we use a product called DIF wallpaper remover.  We purchased some for $6.99 and grabbed a tile/grout sponge and headed home to give it a whirl.  We also grabbed a wallpaper scoring tool for $9.99 with the intention that this would allow us to cut through the paint and get the concentrate to penetrate the wallpaper.  The package cautioned us about the fumes, so I got my “gas mask” and eye protection on and set to work.

After some trial and impatience, I discovered that the solution is about as harmful to the skin as dish soap (and smells about like dish soap) so I ditched my safety gear for the easy of breathing and required hand dexterity.  It was a slow process, basically, we started peeling up the paper/paint for the first layer and then used the solution to saturate the paste underneath.  Once it was saturated, it peeled off fairly easy with a putty knife.  We also found that the thicker the paint was, the easier it was to get a large chunk peeled off (the painting got sparse as we neared the ceiling and that paper is the hardest to remove).  As for the wallpaper scorer, I get the idea behind it, but in reality, it made the paper extremely hard to peel off, so we abandoned it pretty early on in the process.  It may be something that has worked for you, but we had no luck on that front.

Yeah, we’re 2 hours in at this point…..UGH.

This was at the end of Saturday night (don’t be concerned, we turned the light like that to help provide better lighting on our situation).

Sunday we were feeling okay about our progress and were starting to find our rhythm, the lingering problem was that there was some bits of glue all over that were stubbornly remaining in place.  We were worried that our continually sponging of the spot was getting our drywall too much moisture.  Back to Sherwin Williams I went to pick up the DIF gel stripper.  We sprayed the gel on the stubborn spot since it didn’t run down the wall like the concentrate and continued using the concentrate on the large patches.  We were able to make some progress and we’re finally at 70% cleaned up by Sunday evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our hope is to have it all off by Wednesday so we can start in on the trimming progress, but don’t worry, I’ll definitely keep you posted as we go!  Anyone tackled a bathroom renovation that went south?  Do you have any painted wall paper tips/tricks for us??  Do you think we should just stop where we are and making an artistic statement with our partially papered bathroom?  Don’t you hate when a small project escalates???

This crazy hobby of ours…

We left off talking about our niece and nephews visit here…what else has been going on in our life?

Well, the weekend of June 4th, we were in town but decided to do an adventure race.  For those of you who might be new to adventure racing, adventure racing is a race consisting of physical and mental tasks.  You might run/hike, bike, do random challenges, canoe, etc.  A large part of the fun is you generally have no idea what to expect when you start a race, they are all different and every time I do a race, I love it more!  We signed up to do the long course, urban adventure race.  An urban race is a bit different, they don’t usually have a lot of technical map reading, it’s more based on clues and how well you know the city.

Steve & I started doing these races early on in our relationship, and found it was a great way to build our communication and problem solving skills as a couple.  We then added 3 person races to our portfolio with the addition of our friend Andrew to the team.  Whether we are a team of 2 or 3, we work well together and have fun doing these races…even when we’re frustrated, we stick together and accomplish what we set out to do. Last Saturday was the perfect day for an adventure race!  It was a overcast in the morning and didn’t get too hot until we were done.  Excitement was in the air and we were ready to get started.

If you are interested in getting involved with adventure racing at some point, I suggest starting with the short course of an urban race to get a feel for it without making a huge commitment.  This race was a lot of fun involving soccer goals, blind folded frisbee golf, making a rock climbing harness out of rope, and doing a lap in the roller derby ring (among other randomness).  At one point, we had to plant a flower in the community garden and the race photographer snagged this photo of us.

We didn’t win, but the point of these races is rarely to win…generally finishing is a feat in and of itself!  It was a great way to spend the day and was a nice break from all the driving we’ve been doing!  We also realized how out of shape we are…so we definitely need to hit the trails

The great news?  We’re done going for quite awhile, so this weekend we’ll be tackling some long awaited house projects.  I can’t wait!

Sometimes, life happens

Hi blogging world friends!  Sorry I have been MIA the last few weeks… it’s just been crazy busy.  I have no idea how it’s already the 2nd week of June.  Where have we been and what have we been doing?  Well, a lot (not on the house though, sorry to burst your bubble there).  The craziness all started about 3 weeks ago.  As I have (maybe) mentioned before, parents-in-law live about an hour and a half away.  My niece and nephews from Colorado came out to spend a few weeks with their grandparents.  Since we’re close now, we finagled a weekend with them all to ourselves and we had a blast!  We spent the weekend playing air hockey, wii, going to the zoo, baking cookies, and playing with the dog.

We hit up the rain forest first.  Aiden was so distracted by fish that were bigger than him he couldn’t turn around for a photo  and yes, that’s a cast on his hand…he dropped a bowling ball on this thumb (before he came to visit his aunt and uncle) and broke it.

Us with the bronze elephant

Sadly, we didn’t take many more photos…I’m not sure why, guess we were too busy having fun

The weekend was followed with a shortened week and then we packed the kids up to take them home to Denver.  While we were in Denver, we took a mini-vacay to check out the Sand Dunes (which were amazing and I definitely recommend) , Pikes Peak, and Garden of the Gods.  Steve & his sister ran the Bolder Boulder (it’s a 10k that takes place in Boulder every year).  I’m really good at watching them run.

View when we pulled up to the sand dunes….it just looked like a picture, it was so weird to see the HUGE dunes of sand right by the mountains

I was really impressed at the accessibility of the sand dunes.  They had designated Sand chairs you could borrow (for free) if you were visiting the sand dunes in a wheelchair.  I have been in start of the art buildings that didn’t try even half as hard as the Sand Dunes did to be accessible for all (that was a side tangent).

Us at the top of the dunes.  It was SO WINDY up there!  We had sand EVERYWHERE (if you look closely, we both have what can best be described as sand beards).  It was worth the climb, even though it hurt being pelted with sand blowing at 45 mph!

We had heard you could sled down the sand dunes, so we came prepared…sadly, this didn’t really work out, but was hilarious nonetheless.  It’s so windy in this photo it blew Steve’s arm up (I know it looks like he’s holding it up, but it caught serious wind and he was trying to keep it from blowing away).

The next day, we decided to head up to Pike’s Peak.  Here is Steve perched at the top!

He was definitely nervous about sitting on that rock, but after I climbed out there, he decided it was probably safe.

Me at the Garden of the Gods

I don’t have any pictures of the Bolder Boulder, but it was about how you would imagine thousands of people running would look.

After the race, we had to head home.  Somewhere around North Platte, NE we started to get bored.  Steve threw out that North Platte is home of the largest rail yard in the world.  With a fun fact like that, how could we not go to check it out??  To our surprise, they had a very nice visitor center and tower to visit.  Want to check it out?  Click here.

It was gorgeous out and a GREAT break from driving.

How cool is that???  I was impressed with the tour booklet they gave us.  I probably read it to Steve in my best train conductor/tour guide voice….We finally decided to get back on the road (we were about 4 hours from home…ish) and discovered we had probably taken too long at the tower.  Why did we think that?  Well…this happened.

As we pulled out of town, we were hit with 70 mph wind gusts.  It was blowing the fields away and was crazy…we were trying to get out of it when we looked in front of the car and saw this.

Yep, giant wall cloud.  We checked our phones and saw that this band of storm was in ND, SD, NE, KS, MO, and MN…that’s a BIG storm.  It was pretty red on the radar and with the 70 mph winds behind us, we knew it was only a matter of time before this got bad.  After assessing our situation, we decided the best thing we could do was see if we could get on the other side of the storm and beat it home.  We have never drove so focused or diligently before.   The storm was pretty much on our tail the whole way across the state.  As soon as we got through it, we heard that a few miles behind us a tornado had touched down.  Thankfully, we were able to outrun it and make it home safe…but it was a little scary in the middle!

Our view as we drove under the storm system

Poor Steve about blew away trying to get us some gas!

So there you have it, the first part of our recent adventures…more to come, but I’m tired all over again just thinking about all this activity